Now that I have had my One for 5 days I decided to share my thoughts.
Build quality: Phone looks and feels great, not much more to say that hasn't been said a billion times already. The only other thing I will mention is people complaining about gaps, dead pixels etc. My phone has no gaps and after spending time looking for dead pixels on different backgrounds and brightnesses I have not been able to find any. So after some fears that are laid to rest I am blown away with the quality of this handset.
Screen: Screen looks fantastic, With power saver off it blows my Galaxy S away ( yes i know its old, but still a nice amoled display. Coming from the over saturated screen I must say I love the "real to life" looking display as well as its sharpness. I feel like I'm looking at a plasma tv compared to some over saturated led ones. Also like I said earlier no dead or stuck pixels that I can find.
Battery Life: I am kind of on the fence with this one and need some more time to really make a judgement. I was able to get 35 hours out of it with 1 hour call time, 3:20 screen on time, 17:30 wifi, and included maybe an hour or so of field runners 2, an hour of chrome, 20 txts, and some music. Using it just as a phone Im sure I could stretch it for 3 days.
That being a plus, I must say I am a little shocked at how fast the battery can drain when using the phone. Playing games can knock 15% of your battery in like 20 minutes. Surfing the net sees the battery drain a percent every couple minutes maybe and watching videos drains it pretty quick also. Its just more than I thought is all. I can still get 15-20 hours using the phone heavily as long as I am not playing games and that's all I really need it to do.
** Keep in mind that I was mainly using the phone at home with low signal. Battery life will probably be better in a high signal area**
Call quality/Reception: I have seen rumours of "antennagate" bad reception, bad call quality etc. On my phone, I cannot get signal to drop even holding it with both hands covering the whole phone. Not to mention I have bad signal at home, my Galaxy gets 0 bars to no connection and even at 0 bars it wont make a call. The One gets between 1 and 2 bars. It makes perfect calls, and even once when it dropped to 0 bars I did not notice any quality changes. This is amazing, my wife's and friends phones don't get signal either. I can sit in the middle of my house and make phones and has not dropped one call.
Call quality is also spectacular, It sounds like I am on my home phone. Honestly 10/10 to me the signal strength and call quality alone make this phone a blockbuster. Add in that it gets full wifi signal across the house (Our laptops can't even manage this) and I am glad I chose The One.
*Edit* as promised signal picture, the galaxy on the right shows 0 bars with -111 but as soon as you touch it it drops to 0, the -105 or lower that i get with the htc one doesn't drop when I hold it at all.
Sound: The sound is loud, and front facing which really is a huge plus. I just would't go in thinking its going to sound like real speakers. More like decent laptop speakers. Which is still great compared to any other phone....I just think some reviewers tend to blow the sound quality out of proportion.
Camera: It really does take good low light pictures, its pretty cool how much extra light it can see. In the limited amount of pictures I have taken they have all turned out pleasing, however as we know, this probably is not the camera for you if you crop pictures.... details become grainy pretty quickly. One thing I really like about the camera is the focus and shutter speed, it really takes pictures quickly.
Video camera quality is very good, and I am quite happy with its performance. Zoe is pretty cool as well.
Some notes: I just thought I would put down a few notes of some other things I have noticed. One annoying thing is at one point the battery was not updating, it would run down 10% and still not update. I would have to reboot to get it to update. After charging to full this issue seems to have gone away...we will see if it returns at some point. Another thing is Facebook pictures in my gallery. Its not a deal breaker I would just rather not have them there. My google sync stopped working and I had to delete my account and re add it...I'm not sure what the issue was but seems to be fixed now. Sense is great, I really enjoy it and it really is FAST no lag at all at any time. I even like blink feed.
Conclusion: Even with a few little issues this phone is the best phone I have ever seen. Build quality is fantastic, and the signal strength issues that have plagued me are solved with this device. I recommend it whole heartedly and I am positive most people that own it do as well. One other thing, I am using a Incipio duelpro CF case, and I am super happy with it. Protects the phone but still keeps it small and it looks really good also. Thumbs up to incipio.
** Canadian HTC One through Telus on the Sasktel Network.**
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