HTC One review

It’s still a good camera by any other standards, however. The HTC’s macro mode took detailed close-up shots, and the panorama mode quickly captured widescreen images without major stitching errors. We like HTC’s redesigned camera app: a tap on the top-left corner opens up a menu crammed with options, a horizontal swipe switches between the front and rear cameras, and the bottom-left corner is home to more than a dozen filters. The burst mode is effective for capturing fast-paced action, too.

A tap on the top of the screen opens up the HTC One camera’s most novel feature – Zoe. This shoots 3.6 seconds of 1080p video, while simultaneously snapping 20 full-resolution 4-megapixel images. The videos produced can be uploaded to social networks and play automatically in the Gallery app, and those 20 frames can be sifted through and repurposed as still images – handy for grabbing the perfect action shot. It’s a nifty party trick, and the HTC One can also combine these short clips and still images to stitch together 30-second highlight videos.

Sense

HTC has also loaded the One with version five of Sense, its Android user interface. Underneath Sense 5, the HTC One runs Android 4.1.2. It isn’t the latest version, but HTC has filled the gaps with its own additions. The notification drawer has a link to the full settings menu rather than version 4.2’s quick toggles, and HTC’s own gesture keyboard works as well as the software included with stock Android.

Elsewhere, changes are less dramatic. We don’t like the new 3 x 4 grid in the app drawer, but it’s easy to revert to the traditional 4 x 5 layout.

Sense 5’s key new feature is BlinkFeed, which replaces the traditional homescreen with a tiled gallery of web content, news stories and social media posts. It’s the first thing to appear when the phone is unlocked, and it looks superb: scrolling downwards reveals vibrant tiles loaded with pictures, headlines and status updates.

A dropdown menu allows for a basic level of customisation. Relevant topics and a limited selection of specific “featured” websites can be added to or removed from the feed, and Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn integration can be toggled on and off. It isn’t possible to disable BlinkFeed completely, but it can be moved to an alternative homescreen if you don’t want it taking centre stage.