Hi there, Alex Kidman from finder.com.au with
our video review of the brand new HTC U11. Now HTC has had a bit of an
interesting run of late in the mobile phone space. The immediate predecessor
to this phone would be the HTC U Ultra and that was an okay but
ultimately a little bit disappointing phone but right before their HTC was a
manufacturer behind Google's pixel and pixel XL phone and they were
excellent as such the U11 could have been a
disappointment could have been brilliant and the good news is that largely it's
brilliant it's a really really good phone let's get into why that is on the
design front the U11 borrows the same liquid design idea that it had in the
U Ultra which means you can get it in a variety of colors with a glossy finish
that mostly looks really good now obviously this is a matter of taste
most of these brighter designs are very ostentatious and you're going to like
that kind of thing so this to make any sense for you. Here in Australia we're
only going to see the silver and black finishes and the black is fairly
conservative you've got a like a fairly plain looking phone for that to really
work for you I would favor the silver I think the silver really shows off the
design quite nicely where the black just looks a little bit more ordinary and
dull. The design overall is fine but not truly inspiring for a premium phone if
you compare it to something like the Galaxy s8 for example with its really
nice smooth side that's probably a better designed phone in the most part
the u11 has relatively thick bezels for a 2017 handset and when you compare it
against other handsets in that premium price space it doesn't compare entirely
favorably as with the U Ultra HTC has dropped the 3.5 millimeter headphone
jack so all you get is USB C for having both power and audio duties HTC do
provide a pair of quite decent noise cancelling headphones in the box as well
as a USB c2 3.5 millimeter adapter which is handy so why do I particularly
like this phone? Well first of all, first and foremost, it's a powerful phone it's
running the qualcomm snapdragon 835 processor it's actually the first phone
that we'll see in Australia to launch with that processor on board there are
international models of the Galaxy s8 that run on the snapdragon 835 but here
in Australia we get the Exynos 8995 and that's Samsung's own
in-house silicon running the S8 and S8+. Now Qualcomm has put a lot of hype
behind the 835 so I was very keen to see how it would actually perform in a
real-world phone and the U 11 performs really really well, it performs as a
premium phone in 2017 should anecdotally it's really really slick and fast it's
running on Android 7.1.1 at the moment it may we'll see updates
in the future and in a benchmark since it's right up there it performs as well
if not better than most other comparable handsets, so if you're buying a premium
phone because you want a powerful phone this is a good phone to buy now having a
powerful phone often means that the battery life suffers because something's
got to push that processor along but the HTC u11 performs pretty well here as
well again just in regular day to day usage getting a single day out of it is
generally not a problem as with any phone yes you can run them flat if you
run them hard enough that's true of any handset but it's pretty easy to keep
this particular phone going for an entire day. Then there's the camera and
again HTC has had a bit of an up-and-down relationship with camera
technology the pixel phones of course had exceptionally good cameras the U
Ultra had a very heavily hyped camera that ultimately ended up being a bit
disappointing but the U 11 has been a real return to form there's only a
single lens on this particular camera on the rear and it's a 12 megapixel lens
but like most of HTC's recent fare it's using their ultra pixel
technology which uses larger pixel sensor sights to deliver better
low-light performance it's also an extremely fast focus and the mix of all
those technologies leads to a camera that can takes an exceptionally good
photos and you push it really hard in low-light yes
it does struggle a bit but again that is true of every smartphone camera if you
want really good low-light performance buy yourself a DSLR. The U11 is also
water resistant with an ip67 rating and as always I've got a caution that that's
a rating that's done with fresh lab water so if you take it to the bottom of
the ocean no it's not going to survive if you decide to take a lengthy bath
with it it's probably not the best thing for it but accidental splashes or even
just dropping it in water no problem whatsoever.
The HTC U11 is water resistant to an ip67 rating which means you can drop it
fully in water and it will keep working. That's clean water though, drop it in anything soapy or salty or take it too
deep and it's still probably going to kill the poor thing. And then there's what HTC calls edge sense, now this is
the ability to squeeze the phone at the roughly bottom third of it in order to
initiate actions and it sounds a bit gimmicky oh it's a squeezable phone, does that
mean it's soft on the sides or anything no it's not you could actually disable
this and nobody would know it's there and what I like about the way HTC
has done is because almost everyone has kind of struggled with this idea of let's
have a secondary display or let's have an edge display or let's have something
that does something with the edges of the phone as most of them replicate
features you can already do in a way that's more complicated so for example
on the s8 the edge display there you've got to swipe across you've got to
make sure the swipe works and then you tap something that you could have had as
a shortcut on the screen the whole time the way edge sense which is HTC
squeezable technology works instead it just does simple actions you can set a
long and a short squeeze and you can set the amount of force you want those
squeezes to use so you don't necessarily have to have the grip of Hercules in
order to get this thing to work I personally favor having the short
squeeze initiate the camera and the long squeeze initiate the light but you can
set it to just about any app that you like the beauty of this though is
because it's not terribly complicated you tend to associate it with very simple
actions and they're simple actions that you can do one-handed so if you did need
to whip the phone out of your pocket to take a quick photo take it out take it
out of your pocket squeeze your instantly in the camera
and another squeeze we'll take that photo for you
that also means of course because the phone itself is water-resistant that you
could use it in a limited scope for underwater photography as well HTC has
said that they're going to open up an SDK for developers to implement edge
sense into their apps it'll be interesting to see how well that gets
picked up and what gets done with it because in some ways complexity will
actually be the enemy of this feature not its friend now edge sense is all
well and good but it's not perfect and one of the clearest ways to see this is
when you use the squeeze feature for activating the camera and then taking a
photo now for activating it's fine it's nice and quick and as I said the camera
itself is really fast and sharp however because you're squeezing the
body of the camera you almost always put a bit of shudder into the photo which
can ruin your framing and of course introduced some focus problems now
there's a short delay when you take the photo this way and I suspect that's
the way that HTC is actually handling trying to keep things in focus but often
when I was trying to take photos that way I would find that it would stumble
and instead you'd end up with either the wrong frame shot or something that was
out of focus anyway very quickly I just resolved to using the volume control as
the shutter which you can do on just about any other phone. So what do I not
like about this particular phone because no phone is perfect well there are a few
things the design is one of them I've already touched on that it's a
relatively plain design for a premium phone if you are buying a phone for the
design and the look of it there are snazzier phones out there and this is
especially true of the black the black is not the best looker of the bunch
if you've got the choice I would strongly advocate that you go for the
silver which gets a nice reflective blue tone off it that's a matter of personal
taste of course dropping the headphone port well HTC are not the first
to do this of course Apple kind of led the way in terms of premium handsets
with no 3.5 mil adapter but it's still a bit of a pain point and especially so
because the headphones that HTC gives you in the box they're excellent
headphones but they only work with the U11 and they may well work with U Ultra
as well I haven't been able to test that but if you then thought well I've got
another USBC headset and I've got these headphones I'll use those, nup, not going
to happen at best you just won't hear anything
at worst everyone on the train will look at you oddly when your music comes
blasting throughout that area the other thing with that glassy design of course
is that it's a real fingerprint smudge magnet that can be really problematic
unless you want to keep it cleaning cloth although of course you do throw it
into a case you won't necessarily see that so who's the HTC U11 best suited
for well if you're after a premium phone almost everyone if a premium phone is
what you want it is seriously worth your consideration especially at the
Australian price point it'll go on retail sale on the 5th of June for $999
outright which is quite low for a premium handset, most
other premium handsets are edging up towards eleven, twelve hundred and
sometimes more so $999 is a really good price for a phone that's this powerful,
that has the battery life that it has it has the camera that it has, it's a really
really good package in that sense. That being said you've got plenty of other
options at the rough thousand dollar price point you could save yourself
another hundred dollars and go for the slightly smaller Huawei P10 you if you
wanted more flexibility in your camera options you could go a similar dual lens
solution with the LG G6 the Samsung Galaxy s8 is still probably king of the
hill overall because it's got a few other technologies and a few other
features and a slightly nicer design but it will cost you $200 more the U11 will
also be available on contract Virgin Mobile and Optus will offer it
from the 5th of June in both the black and silver finishes while Telstra will
have it from the 4th of July but only in black. Want to know more about the HTC U11?
You can find the full review at finder.com.au