[Review] HTC 10 – Is it a perfect ten?

Performance & Camera
Under the hood, the HTC 10 comes with a Snapdragon 820 64-bit quadcore processor that clocks in at 2.15GHz and an Adreno 530 GPU. Paired with this is 4GB RAM and 32GB of expandable storage via the microSD card slot that can support up to 256GB cards.

The HTC 10’s display this time improves on what its predecessor the M9+ offered. It bumps the size up to 5.2-inches and beefs the resolution up to 1,440 x 2,560 pixels while sheathing the whole affair in Corning Gorilla Glass 4. Colours are bright, vibrant and punchy though you can alternatively opt to tweak colours to one of two settings: Vivid or Standard RGB with a further option of dialing in the colour warmth as needed via a colour slider. Most users will probably keep it on Vivid for best effect. When tested with the Dark Knight Returns, blacks were suitably deep with good overall detail.  Streaming Westworld on it was quite a delight with every craggy line on Ed Harris’ face appearing in crisp detail as he maims his way through everyone and everything he encounters in the show.

Paired with the front facing speakers, the HTC 10 is one of the few phones that covers the bases on both the video and the audio front. Audio quality on the built-in speakers is good and while they are relatively detailed as phone speakers go with minimal distortion when dialled to maximum, they aren’t particularly loud. Fortunately, when paired up with a suitable pair of cans, the HTC 10 didn’t disappoint. It’s one of a growing number of Sony Hi Res audio certified phones and when put through its paces with a variety of challenging tracks, the HTC 10 delivered with excellent clarity, detail and a great sound-stage across a gamut of tracks from Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones all the way to Enya’s Orinoco Flow.

When put through its paces, the HTC 10 was a solid performer with the Snapdragon 820 chip leading the way, offering blazing fast performance across all manner of tasks. It handled everything thrown at it with a dab hand with web pages loading up in seconds, videos running as smooth as silk and a host of games like Clash Royale, King of Fighters 2012 and Asphalt 8 handled in a similarly smooth fashion. The benchmarks are equally agreeable and mirror real world performance. Epic Citadel yielded a 57.3FPS on High Quality with 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. 3D Mark’s Sling Shot using ES 3.1 test yielded a very respectable score of 2,196 and Antutu Benchmark achieved a total score of 116,092.

GeekBench 3 got a score of 1,961 on single core performance and 4,042 for multi-core performance while a test with PC Mark achieved a score of 4429.

HTC’s latest incarnation of Sense UI has a unique theme manager that, on top of the usual homescreens, includes a new mode they’ve dubbed as Freeplay mode that lets you customise your theme in a unique fashion, allowing you to plonk widgets and icons anywhere on the map without being forced to stick to the usual grid layout. It’s a quaint but welcome touch with a host of fan-made options available and the ability to make your own though you’ll need a lot of free time on your hands to make your own custom theme. 

The fingerprint reader is highly responsive though the lack of clickiness takes getting used to. Placing your digit on the reader fires up the home screen in seconds to unlock the phone.  HTC’s revamped Sense UI is remarkably free of bloatware and is pared down to the bare minimum of apps with little to no repetition in between any built-in apps or Google’s own bundled stuff which is a refreshing change. As a first, the HTC 10 ditches a proprietary photo gallery app and solely relies on Google Photos which has features and functionality to match almost any bundled vendor gallery app and eschews traditional options like Polaris Office or WPS Office for productivity, instead opting solely on Google Docs for paperwork crunching.

Getting about is fast and snappy with little lag in the menu. The characteristic HTC BlinkFeed page is still present and aggregates news content from feeds you have subscribed to, putting them all in one easy to read spot. The stock Sense UI is one of the cleaner, better ones that we have come across in awhile.

The rear 12-MP camera on the HTC 10 is augmented by optical image stabilisation as well as an F/1.8 aperture. In terms of image quality, the HTC 10 didn’t disappoint with excellent snaps under all conditions including low light in your choice of jpeg or RAW formats. 

On Auto settings, the camera was able to handle the gamut of standard scenarios including indoor snaps, outdoors and the obligatory food shots. Skin tones were reproduced well on the rear camera and had good detail with otherwise superb colour reproduction for a camphone.

Videos are captured in your choice of a sharp 2160P or 1080P all the way down to something suitable for sending via MMS. There were occasional hiccups with the light metering with the rear camera attempting to adjust between areas of extreme light and darkness when capturing both snaps and video but it was otherwise spot-on most of the time. The rear camera also has a panorama, manual slow-motion and hyperlapse mode that comes in handy when the need arises.

The front selfie camera is one of the best in the market with HTC’s OIS and the camera’s larger 1.34 µm pixel size delivering judder free, crisp snaps even amidst low light conditions or situations where your hand-to-eye coordination is lacking. Unfortunately this is tempered by a dearth of available beautification options so all you can do is tick a Makeup Mode and toggle a slider back and forth adjust the level of make-up on your mug. It’s rather basic though natural shots are pleasing enough that you don’t require it much.

Page 1	Design & Build Quality
Page 2	Performance & Camera
Page 3	Battery Life & Conclusion