I got the HTC One yesterday from ATT, and it has blown me away. As background, I have been an Android fan and my wife is an iPhone fan. I currently have the S3 and my wife has an iPhone 5. I was waiting for the S4, but upon researching HTC One (CNet has a good review and comparison), I did not want to wait for the S4, and I am very happy with the decision. Ironically, I came upon the HTC name because I was researching the S4, and saw that Samsung pled guilty to hiring students in Taiwan to write negative reviews about HTC One. Strange but true.
Anyway, I am a tech junkie and wanted to provide some background to my thinking. In my opinion, an iPhone tries to combine high end components and squeezes out the best user experience possible from a limited, boring (and now aging) system-in short I think an iPhone is a very efficient design despite its limitations. Samsungs are the oppositepowerful, almost garish (TouchWiz and the plastic body, cheesy software) and full of software without regard to how it would actually workuser experience is pretty bad as I can attest to using S Voice. S4 sounds cool but in my experience Samsung flings all they can at a wall and hope that something sticks (and it has worked for them). It's the opposite of an iPhone. In my opinion, HTC falls in the middle and combines the best attributes from the two. Power and flexibility of Android, gorgeous beautiful design (the best I have EVER seen on a phone), and software features that are useful and sensibly implemented. I love HTC Sense on this phoneit is light and responsive, and I really like Blinkfeed(seems to be a Flipboard/Windows 8 copy but it works). Camera software has been updated, and Zoe (short 3 second "films") is geniusI never thought how cool it was till I tried it.
In terms of performance, the phone was very snappy and blazing fast with no lag whatsoever. Sound quality for calls was good and I particularly liked the speakerphones. Additionally, the sound from the stereo speakers was surprisingly loud, so much so that I could crank the phone up in a room and play music without needing external speakers. The highlight of the phone to me was the camera which excels in low light. HTC has halved the number of pixels (hopefully this will end the pixel arms race as it was getting ridiculous) but doubled the size of the sensor. So images in low light are outstanding and beats my S3 and iPhone 5 hands down.
I'll update the review as I spend more time with the phone (I'll also be posting this on CNet). This may be my "honeymoon" period with a new phone and maybe I am over-hyping this, but honestly I feel this is by far the best phone I've ever used, and it is an order of magnitude better than anything in the market today. Frankly, I think this is better than anything that has been announcedincluding the S4. I'm a very happy user.
UPDATE: It's only been a day so I did not put battery numbers but since someone asked me, I'll put my answer here as well. I went through a "normal" day today with regular calling, continuous push email from my work outlook email and personal yahoo email, some camera Zoe use and general "playing around" and had 50% left by the end of the day. I know that CNet's review had the continuous battery life at 9+ hours, equal to the vaunted iPhone battery life. Frankly, that is one of the reasons that I bought the phone as battery life is important to me. Given CNet review, and my limited experience today. I feel very comfortable about it. I'll update this in case my experience turns out to be different over the next couple weeks.
UPDATE 2: OK. The battery life rocks.It goes back to my statement of this phone being a very efficient systemlike the iPhone. I'm NOT a gamer, but I use the GPS/navigation a lot (in the excellent car mode for the phone that makes the display tailored for drivinglarge icons and less complicated and busy), emails all day for work, browsing/YouTube, making calls and camera. I also use the fantastic Google Now feature (not an HTC feature but an Android one)that figured out I was at the airport and automatically displayed my boarding pass on the screen-genius. Anyway, I digress :). During my normal use, the phone has about 50% of juice left after the day. It's very comforting. I don't understand why people complain about the non-removable batteryif they at least use it first before complaining they'd realize this thing can go on for a long time. The other thing I discovered was setting up my phone as an IR blaster remote to control my AV equipment. In this case, it was the HTC software that made what could be a passing novelty into a really useful function. Kudos to HTC. This is an amazing phone. Just wonderful.
UPDATE 3: I'm not sure if it is proper to do this or not but I'm feeling pretty good I did not wait for the S4. Here is a good review from Bloomberg that echoes the feelings I had about S3 I shared above. Looks like the S4 is no different. Link:
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