Back in 2013, most Android phones were garishly ugly and made of cheap-feeling plastics. Sized up against an iPhone at the time, it was easy to see which companies cared about design and which didn’t. HTC flipped that paradigm on its head with the One M7, which had an aluminum unibody and an attractive, minimalist design. It was easily the best-looking Android phone made up to that point, and it inspired many fast followers and copycats.
Fast-forward three years and four generations of phones and the 10 is still much the same. It’s an aluminum unibody phone that’s solid and very well made. HTC’s eliminated almost all plastic from the 10, save for two small antenna strips and a small cap on the top of the phone. The front is covered by glass that blends into the metal frame. HTC says the phone is especially durable and has withstood many drop tests, but I didn’t test this claim. It’s not, unfortunately, waterproof like the Galaxy S7, so you really shouldn’t get it wet at all.
The 10’s look is not an offensive design, but at this point it’s a bit generic and not very compelling. The most radical design element on the phone is the large beveled edge on the back, which says everything you need to know about how unexciting the 10’s design is.
What you won’t find in the 10’s design are HTC’s signature dual front-facing speakers. Instead, the 10 has a tweeter in its earpiece and a woofer placed at the bottom edge of the phone, each with its own amplifier. The audio output of the 10 is loud and sounds good — I don’t really miss the stereo speakers here and it’s certainly competitive with other premium smartphones. The 10 also has great audio output from its (annoyingly-positioned-on-the-top-of-the-phone) headphone jack, and it can drive some seriously high-end headphones with ease. HTC has also built a tuning app that lets you customize the phone’s output to your ears and specific headphones, making up for deficiencies you might have in your own hearing.
Behind the edge-to-edge glass are a lot of table stakes features for a premium phone. There’s a 5.2-inch quad HD display that’s sharp and bright, but not quite as vibrant or eye-catching as Samsung’s screens. The 10 has a fingerprint scanner below the screen that’s used for authentication as well as a home button, and the other buttons — volume, power, capacitive keys for back and recent apps — work just like you’d expect them to.
The 10's design is best described as genericThe 10’s internal components will be familiar to anyone following high-end phones this year, as well. Its Snapdragon 820 processor and 4GB of RAM ensure snappy performance, and it has 32GB of internal storage with the ability to expand that via a MicroSD card. It’s a very fast and responsive phone: apps open very quickly and I haven’t been able to get the 10 to bog down once. HTC says it worked on both hardware and software optimization to improve touch response and performance and based on my experience with the device over the past week, I’d say the effort was worth it.
HTC says it has also worked hard to extend battery life on the 10, and it has no trouble getting through a day of heavy use for me. The 10 doesn’t have wireless charging, but its 3,000mAh battery can be recharged very rapidly through the 10’s USB Type-C port. HTC says the 10 can go up to two days between charges, which may be true if you’re a very light user, but it’s definitely not able to last that long for me. But I don’t have a problem with the 10 reliably making it through a demanding day of use, which it does.
The camera on the 10 is also a familiar tune: it’s a 12-megapixel unit with a bright, f/1.8, optically-stabilized lens and laser autofocus. It’s the best performing, most competitive camera HTC has ever had and it is capable of taking good pictures. Unfortunately, although it has similar specs to many other phones, it’s not quite as quick as Samsung’s S7 and it has a bad tendency to overexpose images and lose details in the highlights as a result. Coming from the downright awful camera on last year’s M9, the 10’s camera is a world of improvement, but it’s still not as good as the best phone cameras you can get. For the price HTC is charging for this phone, you should expect it to be better.
The front camera has also been majorly upgraded with a new, optically stabilized lens (a first for any smartphone). It can take sharp selfies and video in low light, which, for a lot of people, is probably more important than the back camera’s capabilities.
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