The HTC One is a high-end touchscreen-based Android smartphone developed by HTC. The One was unveiled on 19 February 2013, at press events in New York City and London. As HTC's flagship smartphone for 2013, it is the successor to the company's flagship model in 2012, the One X—which was critically acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful due in part to insufficient marketing efforts. To make the device stand out among its competition, the HTC One was developed with a major emphasis on unique hardware and software features; which included a unibody aluminum frame, a 1080p display, front-facing dual stereo speakers, a camera with a custom image sensor design and the ability to automatically generate montages of media, an updated version of HTC's Sense user experience, BlinkFeed—an aggregator of news and social network content, and an electronic program guide app with the ability to serve as aremote control via an IR blaster located in the device's power button.
Beginning in March 2013, the HTC One was made available to 185 mobile operators and major retailers in more than 80 countries. Manufacturing delays led to a staggered release beginning in late March, with its release date in certain markets (such as Asia and North America) pushed to late-April. Nevertheless, around 5 million units were sold during its first two months of worldwide availability, and by mid-2013, the HTC One had become the most successful launch in the company's history.
The HTC One was universally praised for the quality of its industrial design along with the quality of its display and sound system, and well-received for its overall performance and improveduser experience in comparison to earlier HTC devices. However, certain aspects of the device, such as its photo quality, battery life, and certain aspects of its software, were subject to scrutiny by some critics.
Although HTC has developed several notable Android devices, such as the Dream (the first-ever Android phone), the Nexus One (the first phone of the Google Nexus line), and the Evo 4G (the first 4G phone on Sprint's WiMAX network), it has struggled financially in recent years due to the increasing market share captured by other vendors such as Samsung and Apple. In some markets, HTC released numerous carrier-specific phones and relied heavily on wireless providers to promote its products, a strategy that was unsuccessful in the face of Samsung and Apple's strong marketing efforts. The company's flagship phone in 2012, the One X, received critical acclaim from reviewers, but was commercially unsuccessful in the wake of the Galaxy S III and iPhone 5. In response, the company planned to take bigger risks with their next flagship device to make it stand out among its competitors, and also planned to take a more direct role in promoting its products—doubling its marketing budget for 2013.
Details of the new device, codenamed the M7, leaked from various sources in the weeks prior to its official unveiling. HTC's CEO Peter Chou officially confirmed and briefly revealed a prototype for the new device during a company event on 1 February 2013. Leaked information speculated that the M7 would include a 1080p display, a quad-core processor, a redesigned version of HTC's Sense software, and carry design traits from the Butterfly. The M7 was officially unveiled as the HTC One at a special launch event on 19 February 2013, in New York City and London. HTC originally announced that the One would be released in March 2013 through 185 carriers and retailers in 80 countries, being the largest global launch in the company's history. Launch carriers included AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the United States, EE, O2 and Vodafone UK in the United Kingdom, and Bell, Rogers and Telus in Canada.
HTC initially announced that the One would be released in the United Kingdom on March 15. However, due to high demand and supply issues (especially surrounding the components used by its camera), HTC announced on March 22 that the One would "roll out in the U.K., Germany and Taiwan next week and across Europe, North America and most of Asia-Pacific before the end of April." In the United Kingdom, online pre-orders were shipped by some carriers around the time of HTC's announcement. On 19 April 2013, the HTC One was released in the United States by AT&T (who had exclusive rights to carry the 64 GB model) and Sprint, followed by T-Mobile on April 24.The HTC One was released in Australia on 23 April 2013 by Optus,Telstra, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone.Following the delays, HTC North Asia's president Jack Tong announced that the company would double its production capacity for the HTC One by mid-May to meet growing demand and competition for the device, and to make up for sales lost by the release delays. On 22 August 2013, Verizon Wireless became the final major U.S. carrier to release the HTC One.
Alongside its stock "Glacial Silver" model, the HTC One has been offered in three additional color finishes; "Stealth Black", "Glamour Red", and "Vivid Blue". Color variants are exclusive to certain carriers and retailers; in Australia, the Stealth Black model is exclusive to Telstra,while the Glamour Red version (first introduced in July 2013) has been exclusive to Phones 4u in the UK and Sprint in the US.The Vivid Blue variant, released in September 2013, is exclusive to Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Best Buy in the US.
April 2013, Nokia was granted a preliminary injunction in the Netherlands against STMicroelectronics, which had supplied HTC with microphone components for the One that contained Nokia's proprietary technology.Despite the injunction being against STM, Nokia still used the injunction to publicly accuse HTC of copying technology from its products. HTC would still be able to use the remaining microphones it acquired in good faith; the offending component was replaced with an alternate version in future production runs.
The HTC One uses an aluminum unibody frame with an antenna built into its backing; the choice of material was intended to give the device a solid, premium feel in comparison to smartphones made with a plastic shell. The aluminum is sourced from custom-grade aluminum, and the frame is etched with channels in which the polycarbonate is inset using zero-gap injection molding. The polycarbonate forms a ring around the edge of the device, covers the top and bottom ends, and bisects the back with two lines, one of which flows around the camera lens below. The unibody frame itself takes at least 200 minutes of precision CNC cutting to machine, and the final result is a solid slate of anodized aluminum, white polycarbonate, and tempered glass with chamfered, polished edges.
Internally, the One is powered by a 1.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor with 2 GB of RAM, and supports LTE networks where they are available.Most models of the HTC One come with either 32 or 64 GB of internal, non-expandable storage—unlike the international model, the Chinese and Japanese models include a microSD slot.The One uses a 4.7 inch, 1080p Super LCD 3 display with a pixel density of 468 ppi.The One's internal components are arranged in a pyramid-like layout similar to the Butterfly and 8X; with larger components (such as the screen and battery) positioned towards the front and smaller components (such as the motherboard) positioned towards the back. This internal layout also allows the One to have a curved backing. The HTC One's audio system incorporates front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers, Beats Audio, andHDR audio recording.The HTC One is NFC-enabled and is able to stream HDMI via the microUSB port using MHL 2.0.
The HTC One is equipped with a 4-megapixel rear-facing camera module that contains a custom UltraPixel image sensor, which is composed of pixels that are 2.0 µm in size. While most high-end smartphones at the time of the One's release used 8- or 13-megapixel cameras, the size of the pixels in their sensors have ranged from 1.4 to 1.0 µm, both of which are considerably smaller in size than that of the UltraPixel sensor. Although these smaller pixel sizes were typically necessary to ensure that the camera sensor did not compromise the design of the phone, there were concerns that this could result in a loss of dynamic range and sensitivity, and also result in poor performance in low-light environments. As such, HTC claimed that its camera design could increase overall image quality, especially in low-light environments.The camera also includes optical image stabilization, and is further enhanced by improvements to the Sense camera software and the ImageChip 2 image processor.
The HTC One ships with Android 4.1.2, using HTC's proprietary Sense user experience. The new version of Sense, version 5, uses a minimalist visual style with a redesigned home screen: the signatureflip clock widget seen on previous HTC devices has been replaced by a simple digital clock and weather display. Hundreds of different clock designs by HTC's designers, narrowed down to 25, were considered before the final design was chosen for the new default clock and weather widget on Sense 5. Directly below the clock on the default home screen is a new, scrolling content aggregator known as BlinkFeed, which displays a scrolling grid of news headlines and social network content in a similar fashion to Flipboard and Windows Phone's live tiles. New content is synchronized every two hours when connected to a mobile network, but more frequently while on Wi-Fi. By default, the One only uses two home screen pages: one with the clock and BlinkFeed, and a normal page housing app shortcuts and widgets (as with previous versions of Sense, pages can be added and removed as needed).The application drawer uses a 3x4 grid to display application shortcuts by default, but can still be changed back to the denser 4x5 grid used by past versions.
The camera app includes a new shooting mode known as Zoe (alluding to the zoetrope), which captures a short video alongside each photo taken. Individual frames can be saved from the clip, while the frames can also be used with other editing features such as Sequence Shot (which superimposes multiple frames into a composite image). Photos taken in Zoe mode are also displayed with animated thumbnails in the gallery. The Highlights feature can automatically generate a montage video from photos and videos with multiple theme and soundtrack options. The resulting video can be exported, or posted online through the HTC Share service (where they are accessible for 30 days).The One also includes a TV app, which incorporates an electronic program guide powered by Peel, show recommendations and notifications, and can act as a remote control via an infrared blaster hidden in its power button.An updated music app now includes a visualizer and support for on-screen lyrics.An updated version of the Get Started feature (as introduced by the One X+) allows users to perform initial setup for their One via a web-based service, while a new Sync Manager allows data to be migrated from iOS device backups or HTC devices with Android 4.0 and higher.
Sense 5.0 will not be exclusive to the One; on 28 February 2013, HTC announced that it would provide updates to Sense 5.0 for the Butterfly and One X/X+ in the coming months. However, due to hardware differences, it will not include all of the features implemented by Sense 5 on the HTC One
In July 2013, HTC began rolling out an update to Android 4.2.2 for the One in selected regions; the update adds a quick settings panel to the notification area, Instagram support for BlinkFeed, auto focus/auto exposure lock to the camera, additional Highlights themes, and optimizes how Zoes are saved (producing a static JPG and a MP4 video file, instead of saving each frame as a separate image file). The update also adds the ability to show the current battery percentage on the status bar, more consistent behavior for the home button, allows the removal of icons from the home screen's dock, adds the ability for the Home button to serve as the Menu button in certain apps by holding it down (in lieu of displaying it on a black bar on-screen), allows Google Now to be accessed by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, and adds support for displaying widgets on the lock screen (however, unlike stock Android, only one widget can be placed on the lock screen at a time).
In North America, Android 4.2.2 is only available as the pre-loaded software on Verizon's HTC One, and will not be released as an over-the-air update. Due to the relatively minor nature of 4.2 on phones, HTC decided to instead focus on releasing an update to Android 4.3, which will be first released on the unlocked Developer Edition model by the end of September 2013.] HTC already began rolling out an Android 4.3 update for the Google Play store variant in early August 2013
HTC ONE
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