A hands-on review of HTC’s new U 11 flagship phome for 2017. Take a look at its ever changing colour and find out why you can squeeze it.
By
Chris Martin | 15 mins ago
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£679
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HTC’s new flagship phone for 2017 is a mix of well-known One range and the newer U series devices. But can this alchemy keep up with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and LG G6? Here’s our hands-on review of the squeezable HTC U 11. See also: Best phones for 2017.
The name might seem confusion but HTC is continuing the numerical series it started with the HTC One M7 and tagging it onto the end of the more recently U range of glass phones. The main selling point of the HTC U 11 is that you can squeeze the sides to perform various tasks.
Coming in with a similar price to the Galaxy S8, the HTC U 11 will be priced at £679 which is about average for a 2017 flagship.
The new phone will available in the UK starting on the first week of June, we’re informed.
As teased by HTC ahead of the launch, the key design element and unique selling point is that the phone is squeezable. The firm calls this feature ‘Edge Sense’ and it’s achieved by pressure senors on either side of the phone.
It’s somewhat comparable to iPhone ‘s 3D Touch and the hidden pressure sensitive home button on the Samsung Galaxy S8.
They sit on the bottom half and mean you can do various things by squeezing it rather than using buttons or the display. What’s clever is that you can adjust how much force is required and also toggle visual, haptic and audio feedback.
At launch you’ll be able to do quite a few things like use it as a shutter button, launch voice dictation, launch Google Assistant or apps. You can short or long press for different results and the Edge Sense Add-On will allow you to customise the sensors within any app so you could squeeze to zoom in Google Maps. Sadly the app, even in beta form, won’t launch with the phone.
Because the sensors only require pressure to work, you can use Edge Sense with gloves and it should also work with most cases, according to HTC.
We’re not entirely sure whether this is an awesome innovation or attention seeking gimmick just yet but it’s certainly interesting.
Although HTC is merging its older One (we’re including the HTC 10) and newer U ranges together for this flagship, the U 11 is much closer to the latter in terms of design.
Instead of the previously familiar metal uni-body, the phone is mostly made from glass. The ‘3D liquid surface’ design essentially means that the glass is moulded with nice curves with the aim of mimicking the surface tension of water.
The U 11 has this on the back and front and while it feels nice ergonomically it comes with issues.
Like some rivals, the glass rear cover means the phone is slippery and dropping it will almost certainly result in a shattering of your nightmares. Glass also shows up fingerprints and other marks so you will feel the need to clean it a lot.
Some colours hide the grubby marks better but they all suffer from this issue. The good news is that there are some new options – Amazing Silver and Solar Red – the latter providing everything from red through to gold. The bad news is that the Solar Red won’t be available at launch.
The fascinating way the phone changes colour in a pearlescent way is achieved by something called ‘Optical Spectrum Hybrid Deposition’ where plenty of heat and pressure mean the colours bond to the glass in layers.
In terms of size the HTC U 11 sits between the existing U Play and U Ultra but is closer to the larger model. There are two important design elements to make you aware of, though.
The first is the exciting news that HTC has finally caught up and gone waterproof so the U 11 comes with an IP67 rating. You can fully dunk the phone in up to 1m of fresh water for up to half an hour so the toilet, bath and sink are no longer dangers.
The second is that like the U Ultra, there’s no headphone jack which will be disappointing for some users. However, not only does HTC include an adapter in the box which will work with almost any USB-C phone, it has an amplifier in it.
With the hardware on phones hitting something of a peak a long time ago, it’s no wonder all the brands are now differentiating predominantly with design. Although it might not be as interesting as the squezzable design, the specs on offer with the HTC U 11 are pretty top not.
Things start off with a 5.5in screen, which makes the HTC U 11 the firm’s biggest flagship phone yet. HTC sticks to the Quad HD (1440 x 2560) resolution and LCD5 technology found on the HTC 10 – it’s much more standard compared to the more whacky displays on the LG G6 and Galaxy S8.
The size increase means a drop to 534ppi compared to its predecessor but that’s hardly an issue. The colours might not be as punchy as AMOLED rivals but you’re unlikely to be disappointed with the screen which is certainly flagship level.
Gorilla Glass 5 is used here like the U Ultra but there’s no talk of a Sapphire crystal edition.
HTC predominantly uses Qualcomm processors in its phones and that’s no different here. It’s good to see the latest Snapdragon 835 chipset or mobile platform as Qualcomm now calls it.
The octa-core (4x 2.45GHz & 4x 1.9GHz) processor is worthy of any 2017 flagship and performance seems to be very good during hands-on time. We’ll benchmark it full when we get a sample, of course.
The 835 is paired with 4GB of RAM and there’s a decent 64GB of internal storage. That’s seemingly the standard for a flagship phone this year and although there’s a model with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, we’re told it’s unlikely to reach the UK.
Luckily, HTC continues to offer expandable storage via a microSD card slot to that alleviates the issue somewhat. Power users will still be yearning for that higher spec model, though.
Not much has changed in terms of connectivity on the HTC U 11 when compared to the HTC 10.
The phone has the range of hardware you’d expect such as dual-band 11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC, Cat16 4G LTE.
The only physical port is USB-C and once again there’s a front-mounted fingerprint scanner.
HTC has always aimed to offer a premium audio experience with its phones and the HTC U 11 is no different.
Like previous devices, the 11 supports Hi-Res 24bit/192kHz playback but there’s more. Once again the USonic headphones can, via sonar, personalise the audio output based on the shape of your ear canal but this time the included headphones feature active noise cancelling.
These are powered by USB-C and the only way of connecting them as there’s no headphone jack. As mentioned earlier, a 3.5mm adapter is included in the box and even has a tiny amplifier inside.
Furthermore, HTC continues with BoomSound and the U 11 has the Hi-Fi Edition which combines the old style stereo speakers with the newer Hi-Fi setup found on the HTC 10. This time the firm is even using the whole phone as an acoustic chamber.
All of this sounds promising, in theory and literally during hands-on time, but needs proper testing before we give a final verdict.
Like Samsung, things haven’t changed a great deal on the photography front even though the HTC U 11 has a new UltraPixel 3 main camera.
This still has a 12Mp sensor – but with smaller 1.4µm pixels – and features such as optical image stabilisation (OIS) and ultra-fast auto focus which is supposedly quicker than 0.3 seconds. There’s no dual-camera setup here but the aperture has improved to an impressive f/1.
