HTC 10 review

Design

To start our examination of the HTC 10 the easiest place to look is the external design, which is probably something you’ll notice as soon as you take it out of the box. The HTC 10 is pretty much the first time since the original HTC One that HTC has done a major design refresh of their flagship. While it is still an aluminum unibody, with the HTC 10 the phone is basically all aluminum and glass to the touch, which is a noticeable contrast to the One M7, M8, and M9 which were all noticeably plastic in some way. While the One M8 may have seemed to be all aluminum, the speaker grilles were very obviously plastic if you looked too closely, and the One M9 had a very obvious and somewhat cheap-feeling plastic cover on the front of the phone.

In contrast, the HTC 10 basically only has plastic injection molded to demarcate the external antennas, and a plastic RF window on top of the phone for its GPS antenna. The top and bottom “strips” of aluminum function as the antennas for all cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, and NFC connectivity. HTC has also gone back to a circular camera cutout, which is definitely more HTC-like than the square cover lens seen in the One M9. In addition to an LED flash, there’s also an STM VL53L0 time of flight sensor which is used to help guide contrast AF search. However, unlike the dual pixel arrangement of the Galaxy S7’s sensor it’s important to note that distance cannot be mapped to focus in an open-loop fashion so a focus sweep is still needed to reach the final focus target.

Moving past the camera, the back cover’s curved design ends with a fairly exaggerated glossy bevel that is unique for a smartphone. I thought that it wasn’t a particularly elegant design at first but with time it’s been growing on me as there’s a nice contrast between the sandblasted matte surface of the back and the glossy chamfer. The side and back of the phone are all integrated into a single piece, and side is a flat sandblasted surface with yet another glossy chamfered edge that meets with the glass. However, unlike an iPhone 6s the edge of the metal is slightly higher than the edge of the glass, which does cause a noticeable felt edge if you swipe off the edge of the phone. I suspect that this is done for durability reasons or something similar because the edge of the cover glass is curved, so it would be fairly easy and probably cheaper to have completely flat cover glass that wouldn’t have the felt edge. It's also worth mentioning that the 2.5D glass only begins to curve after the end of the display and capacitive buttons so a flat screen protector will cover pretty much everything important on the cover glass. While I'm not sure this is really intentional on HTC's part, it's helpful for those that use screen protectors after my experiences with the Galaxy S7.

When it comes to ports and buttons, pretty much everything is along the sides of the phone. The top has the 3.5mm headphone jack, the right side has the power and volume buttons, and the bottom has the USB-C port and one of the two speakers. The feel of the buttons is dramatically improved relative to the One M9 which were rather soft and uncommunicative, and while the power button is still a bit too low for my taste the ridged design and increased resistance of the buttons means I’m no longer accidentally pressing the power button when I pick up the phone. The buttons themselves are also made of aluminum and break more cleanly when you press on them, which helps to make the phone feel more solid.

The front of the phone is now all glass unlike previous designs, and honestly as a result it looks much cleaner than before. The top of the phone contains the second of the two speakers and the optically-stabilized front-facing camera. Under the display, there is a Fingerprint Cards fingerprint sensor that is purely capacitive and functions as a home button as well as capacitive buttons that are enabled by a Cypress CapSense controller. HTC retains their traditional layout with their display driver on the bottom between the display and fingerprint sensor/capacitive buttons, but due to a move back to capacitive buttons the typing ergonomics of the HTC 10 are dramatically improved and on par with the One M7. While it is possible to enable front-facing speakers without the kind of bezel requirements seen in the One M8 and M9, for a ~5” class device it seems that it’s realistically only possible to fit in one front-facing speaker, while phablets generally have more internal volume in the x and y directions to enable more creative speaker placements to enable the second front-facing speaker without major increases in bezel. It’s notable that HTC has finally eliminated their logo from the cover glass of the HTC 10, which is something I’d say is worthy of mention here as it makes the design of the phone much cleaner from the front. It would be pretty impressive if HTC could move the fingerprint scanner under the cover glass for next year here to have a truly seamless design.