Excellent in so many ways: HTC’s One reviewed

Blink and you’ll miss the feed

One of the more prominent parts of HTC’s new handset experience under Sense 5, the latest iteration of the Android overlay, is a homescreen that you can’t remove called “BlinkFeed.”

This is a screen that endeavours to loosen the stranglehold on news-reading apps you might already be using, such as Flipboard and Pulse, which pull in various news and RSS services from your online world and turn them into a glossy style of reading.

The HTC One homescreen with BlinkFeed on the left and a homescreen on the right. The options screen on the right shows how you add widgets.

We mentioned Flipboard not just because the concepts are similar, but because the look of BlinkFeed has more than a passing resemblance to Flipboard, with rectangular blocks that open up to show the story you press.

News and topic services can be added to BlinkFeed, but these are quite limited.

In fact, in Australia, your selection of sources can include AAP, NYFP, news.com.au, Lifehacker, Bang Showbiz, HitFix, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Tech Radar, and a few other sites we’ve never heard of.

Interestingly, there is no possible way (at least at the time of publishing) to add your own websites and news feeds to the system, meaning if you like reading a dose of GadgetGuy on your phone or maybe even a news source like ABC News, you can’t use BlinkFeed for this.

We did a little more looking into this and found that the whole BlinkFeed system appears to be managed from a different location, and even noticed that occasionally the news feeds were delayed on the weekend, with no “new” news coming in, even though the website had been updated.

You don’t just have to rely on news sources, though, as you can send your Twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn, and calendar information to the rectangles that make up the BlinkFeed screen, with these often working better than the limited news service selection HTC has provided.

Also of note is that BlinkFeed will always be the left-most screen in your homescreen list. It doesn’t have to be your main homescreen, but it will always be there.

But wait, there’s more!

It would be doing HTC a disservice not to mention everything else packed in here, such as the slight changes to HTC’s Android overlay that make the main menu easy to read with a smaller grid (3×4), or for those people that like more icons, there’s a larger one too (4×5).

The inclusion of Beats Audio technology is still relevant, and HTC has doubled the speakers by throwing up two on the front of the device, both of which help to make this handset a portable audio factory, producing loads of sound, whether you’re jamming to tunes or switching the loudspeaker on during a phone call.

Used with headphones, the Beats sound has a little more “oomph,” which is more than just a heavier hitting bass, as the mids and highs are also affected.

We wish you could tweak the equaliser in Beats, compared with HTC’s switch of just “on” and “off,” but it does make you feel like you’re listening to a decent sound-space, and it works across any time you’re listening to audio, not just HTC’s music app, including Pandora, Google Play Music, and even YouTube.