HTC 10 review

If there's one thing you can say about HTC, it's that it's been a victim of its own success.

The One M8 was one of the greatest phones ever made, one that I'll still dust off from 

time to time now just to get a feel for it once more. It was design perfection, filled with 

genuine innovation and offered a great identity too, standing out well from the Android crowd.

The trouble was, that phone was already building on the great HTC One, which started the 'amazing design' trajectory in flagship smartphones that HTC is now famed for. So where did HTC go next? What was the next big innovation, the next great thing that this underdog in the smartphone world was going to bring?

Well, it didn't happen on the One M9, that's for sure. The brand panicked, stuffed the best components into an all-too-familiar shell and hoped the big numbers would make it a success. It wasn't.

                                                                 

This time around, things were going to be different. For the all-new HTC 10 I was told that the brand took things back to basics, made the changes it needed to and focused heavily on making the phone useable and a pleasure to mess around with as before.

But does the HTC 10 impress? Is this the return to true innovation from a company that used to be unafraid to take risks, a reboot back to the winning ways?

Before we get into that, let's take a look at what the phone looks like on paper. It's got an all-metal body, thankfully doesn't go down the same iPhone-a-like design as the One A9 from 2015, and doesn't just stuff in tech for the sake of having a higher spec.

Key features

One of the most irksome features of the HTC One M9 was…well, there weren't really any features to talk about. The same BoomSound speakers were back, firing audio forwards into your face, and the camera was just a 20MP effort that took some okay pictures; not terrible, but nothing you'd tell your friends about down the local watering hole.

In fact, it was just the design that made it worth checking out at all, that combined with HTC's special sauce.

This year, thankfully, there's a lot more to talk about, starting with the efforts made to improve how the phone feels to use. It's got a much lower latency compared to the earlier models, which means the response under the finger is a lot more impressive.

In fact, the constant chat in our briefing about the phone was about 'tuning', that HTC had gone further than any other brand in making the HTC 10 a phone that will impress the second you glide a finger across the screen.

Let's drop out for a second and talk about the name: it's not the HTC One M10, but simply the HTC 10. Apparently, this represents the best ever, the top of the pile, the maximum score you can get in gymnastics.

To me, that sounds like this is HTC's last ever phone. But you can bet there'll be some 'turn it up to 11' tag lines next year when the HTC 11 pops up.