Dubai: HTC has taken a bold decision to change from a metal back to embrace a glass design on its new smartphone — HTC U Ultra.
It looks gorgeous and HTC calls it “liquid surface” design as it appears both as a single block colour and pearlescent, depending on how the light plays off it. HTC has curved the glass not only along the four sides of the device, but also at the corners, giving it a sleek, polished appearance. The glass doesn’t feel slippery, like it can on some handsets, and stays put in your palm.
The 5.7-inch LCD display, protected by a curved Gorilla Glass 5 screen, is powered by a 2.15GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, coupled with the 64GB ROM and 4GB of RAM. The hybrid style SIM tray supports two SIM cards or one SIM and up to 2TB microSD.
The Quad HD (2560 x 1440 pixels) display has 513 pixels per inch density and the brightness is also great on the U Ultra. At 8mm thin, it’s a light device and weighs 170 grams.
The attractive part and new to an HTC device is the second 2.05-inch display located above the main display, similar to what LG launched it in V series. The second display delivers prioritised information for you without interrupting the main display.
The second display can be configured from the settings such as app shortcuts, quick dial entries, hourly weather forecasts, static text reminder, upcoming calendar events and music player controls. Users can swipe left or right to switch between the various menus.
It is somewhat similar to what Samsung has done to S7 Edge.
Artificial intelligence software
The secondary screen isn’t always-on and wakes up when you get a notification or flip your phone up — doesn’t drain battery life.
The main purpose of the second screen is meant to work hand-in-hand with HTC’s new Sense Companion, its artificial intelligence software that can show relevant reminders and alerts throughout the day, similar to Amazon’s Alexa. The second display delivers prioritised information for you without interrupting the main display.
The Sense Companion can use your weather data to suggest if you should dress warmly or to leave earlier than usual for work if traffic is forecasted. But unluckily, Sense Companion will come at a later stage and until then it is of no major use.
Another interesting feature is the “USonic” technology incorporated into the phone. The USonic hi-res USB Type-C headset when placed into the ear analyses your inner ears with a sonic pulse and then adapts to you. It is like having a sound engineer on your phone, now you can hear the details you were missing. It works only with HTC’s specialised headphones and not with others and the sound quality is better.
Audio performance
The device does not have a 3.5mm headphone socket, meaning you won’t be able to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
The device doesn’t offer the twin front-facing BoomSound speakers that once were a bonus on HTC’s handsets, instead, it offers BoomSound Hi-Fi Edition. Two modes are offered — music and theatre.
It combines a range of features to boost the audio performance. This starts with using both the ear speaker and the base speaker to produce stereo sound, giving better audio delivery than phones that opt for mono speakers.
The home button also acts as a fingerprint scanner and it works very fast without any hassles. HTC’s Blinkfeed is also here to give you a full rundown of your day, with social media and news updates available by swiping left from the home screen.
The 12MP single camera on the rear with f/1.8, 26mm, OIS, sapphire lens, laser & phase detection autofocus, dual-LED (dual tone) flash captures a respectable photo given the right conditions but in lowlight conditions, there’s a tolerable amount of graininess to photos and colours look washed out.
As it shoots in HDR by default, shots turn out well in most conditions but the shots tend to be a bit blurry on the edges.
The HTC U Ultra includes four omnidirectional mics, which capture positional sound and allow for 360-degree immersive audio recordings.
So recording with 3D Audio and Hi-Res audio on a 4K video is superb.
The camera can record 2160p at 30 frames per second (24-bit/192 kHz audio) and 720p at a super slow speed of 120 frames per second.
A big bonus of the U Ultra’s camera is the interface, which is very simple to use. The other shooting modes are Zoe camera which captures three seconds of video around your photo, Panorama and Pro.
Macro focus skills
Pro mode offers manual control with 16 seconds long exposure and RAW format support.
HTC also improved the macro focus skills. This won’t let you get as close as some cameras and it’s a lot slower than many, but it’s better than previous HTC phones.
The 16MP front-facing sensor with HTC UltraPixel mode genuinely adds value to the phone’s imaging capabilities if you’re a selfie lover. It delivers true colours even in night mode.
It offers video recording in Full HD as well as an auto HDR mode. The other shooting mode is Selfie Panorama. I found selfies to be lively and vibrant compared to those from other cameras I have used.
HTC should have placed the same emphasis it did on the front camera to the rear camera also.
Regarding connectivity, it has NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5 GHz), streaming media from the phone to compatible Chromecast, DLNA, AirPlay and Miracast devices.
The 3,000mAh battery with some video streaming, web surfing and gaming apps managed to muster only close to a full day out of this which is pretty average. It gave just over 10 hours of video streaming which is below some of the other Android phones in the market. HTC should have raised the battery size due to the bigger screen size.
But the plus side is that it has Quick Charge 3.0 technology which charges 33 per cent of the battery in 20 minutes and just under two hours to hit the 100 per cent mark from zero. Disappointingly, though, there’s no wireless charging facility. It comes in four colours — brilliant black, cosmetic pink, ice white and sapphire blue — and priced at Dh2,799.
Pros
• Beautiful design
• Stunning display
• Good overall performance
• Strong audio capabilities
• Secondary screen can be useful
• Excellent selfie camera
Cons
• Mediocre battery
• A bit expensive
• Rear camera needs improvement
• No HTC Sense Companion at launch
• Not water or dust resistant
• No headphone socket
