HTC 10 review: HTC builds the best Android flagship of 2016

The last 12 months have been dark for HTC. Year over year, the company's revenue was cut in half. At one point, the stock price hit an all-time low of $1.25 a share. Last we heard, HTC's market share was hovering somewhere less than two percent of the market—it's hard to get up-to-date numbers when analysts only ever list the company under "other."

HTC is clawing back, though. The HTC Vive—a VR headset it made in conjunction with Valve—leapfrogged Oculus to be the best and most complete VR package out there. For the past year or two, the company has been searching for alternative revenue streams away from the smartphone market. And while the Vive is still an early adopter product, it's a big bright spot in the company's line up.

So what about the smartphone division then? For 2016, HTC has the HTC 10, a $700 (£570) all-metal smartphone. The specs are your standard 2016 flagship levels: a 2.15 GHz Snapdragon 820 with 4GB of RAM and a 5.15-inch 1440p display. It's the design that is the big differentiator here, though. The 10 looks a lot like HTC's post-2013 flagships, but the new phone works like a "best of" collection of past HTC design decisions.

Design and build quality

SPECS AT A GLANCE: HTC 10
SCREEN	2560×1440 5.15" (570ppi) LCD
OS	Android 6.0 with HTC Sense
CPU	Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 (two 2.15GHz Kryo cores and two 1.6 GHz Kryo cores)
RAM	4GB
GPU	Adreno 530
STORAGE	32GB or 64GB with MicroSD slot
NETWORKING	802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, NFC
BANDS	GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz CDMA: 800/1900 UMTS: 850/AWS/900/1900/2100 MHz LTE (FDD): 1/2/3/4/5/7/12/13/17/20/28/29/30
PORTS	USB 3.1 Type-C, 3.5mm headphone jack
CAMERA	12MP rear camera, 5MP front camera
SIZE	145.9 x 71.9 x 9 mm  (5.74 x 2.83 x 0.35 in)
WEIGHT	161 g (5.68 oz)
BATTERY	3000 mAh
STARTING PRICE	$699 (£569)
OTHER PERKS	Qualcomm quick charge 3.0, fingerprint sensor, notification LED, Airplay support

After the HTC One M8 and the HTC One M9, HTC is dropping the "One M" branding and just calling this device the "HTC 10." The new naming scheme is apt. The phone has slimmed down by cutting out a lot of extras that really didn't need to be there in the first place, and the front of the device has been greatly compacted and simplified. HTC's trademark massive speaker grills are gone, and the "HTC Bar"—an area of bezel dead space that housed only the HTC logo—is gone, too. These two changes let HTC significantly sink the vertical bezels on this device, resulting in a 5.1-inch phone that isn't ridiculously tall like past models were.

The theme of "addition by subtraction" continues in the rest of the phone. With the HTC 10, HTC seems intent on stripping its designs of the last four years down to the bare necessities, righting the wrongs of the previous version. The One M9 had a weird ridge that ran along the perimeter of the phone, almost like the front and back of the phone were two halves of a shell that didn't fit together. This is fixed in the 10, which looks smooth and uniform. The One M9 had a metal body but used a glossy coating that took away from the premium feel of the metal. The HTC 10 feels more like bare aluminum.

With the speaker grills gone, HTC has also done away with the exposed plastic covers that were on the top and bottom of the One M9. The whole front of the device is now covered in glass, which butts right up against the chamfered metal edge of the case. There are still two speakers on the HTC 10—one is a front-facing speaker that sits in the reasonably sized earpiece cutout on the top of the glass, and the other is a bottom-firing speaker next to the USB Type C port. These two speakers are easily the best of any 2016 flagship. They provide a ton of sound at high quality while not wasting the crazy amount of space that they did on past HTC phones. We still wouldn't want to use them to listen to music or anything, but for the occasional game audio or cat video, they're great.

Next to the earpiece is a massive front-facing camera. The large cutout makes way for what HTC says is the "first ever" smartphone with optical image stabilization on the front of the device. While HTC has shipped front-facing cameras with sensors that go as high as 13MP, this is only a more pedestrian 5MP sensor.

For the buttons, HTC went with a Samsung-y hardware home button/fingerprint reader with capacitive back and recent buttons on either side. The fingerprint sensor seems to be the same thing everyone else is using—a fast, accurate touch sensor that is just as good as the iPhone's Touch ID. Usually an implementation like this will go with a clicky home button, but here it's a stationary capacitive button.

I have some nits to pick about the button placement and the design of the phone in general; the buttons aren't vertically centered in the bottom bezel. They sit all the way at the bottom of the phone, so there's a weird lopsided chunk of dead space before the screen starts. I'll also say I don't like the light gray strip of plastic on the top edge. In past versions, that would have been dark plastic for the IR blaster, which looked a lot nicer.

The One M9 created a problem with the power and volume keys, which planted three identically shaped buttons right next to each other. The HTC 10 switches back to a standard volume rocker, so you no longer have to remember if the power button was the top key or the bottom key since they all have a different feel now. And to make doubly sure button confusion isn't an issue, HTC carved big, beefy grooves into the power button, making it really obvious when you're touching it. The sides also house ejectable trays on the left and right side, one for a SIM card and another for a MicroSD slot.

The back of the device couldn't look more like the HTC One M7. It has a rounded metal back with a circular camera lens and two horizontal strips of plastic near the top and bottom. The major change to the back is an extra fat chamfer that runs around the perimeter of the back, and an upgraded camera sensor assembly features a dual LED flash and laser autofocus system. The shape of the sides and back are great. All the corners are smoothed over, the slight roundness of the back and the chamfers make it fit the hand well, and the metal is great. High marks all around.

HTC Sense 8.0: No permanent damage here

The HTC 10 ships with Android 6.0.1 and the "HTC Sense 8.0" skin. Given how heavily Android OEMs lean on skins to "differentiate" their phones, HTC actually did a good job with Sense 8.0. As usual, most of the additions are "change for change's sake" with little boosts in usefulness and functionality, but HTC does the right thing by largely leaving the important, irreplaceable parts of Android alone.

Sure, there's a custom home screen with HTC's weird Blinkfeed news reader and a bunch of reskinned core apps, but all of those can be turned off or replaced. So much of the Android interface can be replaced by apps now that the most important parts of any Android skin are the few parts that can't be replaced by apps—the notification panel, recent apps screen, and settings. HTC's notification panel and settings both follow the stock Android color scheme with only a few extra toggles. Recent apps has an extra "clear all" button, but other than that it has been left alone.

The 2016 flagships from Samsung and LG both have MicroSD slots, but HTC gets major bonus points for being the only one that doesn't break Android 6.0's adoptable storage feature. Adoptable storage allows an SD card to be formatted as "internal storage," which merges the removable and internal storage into a single pool. From there everything is handled automatically, with the system shifting around apps and media as needed. Adoptable storage takes the SD card up to first-class citizen—stick a 200GB card into your 32GB phone and it's like having a device with 232GB of internal storage. The one downside is that removing the MicroSD card after you choose this option is a bad idea, and some apps and data will go missing. (Don't do that.)

But again, this is skinned Android. Of course it's not all useful features and common-sense software. One of the new oddities of Sense is the "Freestyle" layout, which is basically a wallpaper with a matching icon pack. App icons are replaced with "stickers." These are still shortcuts that open apps, but they come in various designs and sizes that aren't related to the app. They also aren't constrained to a grid. The sticker art style matches the background, and the stickers are supposed to act as props or decorations in the scene. One example has a beach scene wallpaper and stickers for a boat, mountains, and a hot air balloon. You can assign the icons to any app you want, and if it weren't for the names under each icon, you'd have a hard time realizing each icon was a tappable object rather than part of the wallpaper.

With no outline or shadowing, the icons blend into the background a little too well, making them hard to spot. Not that any of the icons would be of any importance anyway—you get options like making Gmail a little boat or making the Play Store a palm tree, none of which help with app recognition. Since the icons lose all meaning and background contrast, you end up just scanning the UI for the text you want. If you really want to be crazy, you can also hide the label text, meaning it would be up to you to remember that "little boat = Gmail." It's weird. It almost feels like an attempt at a hyper-skeuomorphic Microsoft Bob-style interface for people who aren't used to icons on a touchscreen. Again, this is optional so feel free to completely ignore it.

All of this is powered by the HTC Theme store, which offers different wallpapers, sounds, fonts, and icons for the "classic" home screen style. We couldn't find anything close to a "stock Android" theme for icons, but if you were going for a stock look most of those are apps you'd completely replace with Google versions anyway.

HTC also has a "Boost+" app, basically a CCleaner-style utility for your phone. The "Boost" button clears apps from memory, while the "Clear Junk" button will remove app cache and temporary files. There's also a "Game battery booster," which will reduce the resolution to 1080p "when playing selected games." It's hard to see this as anything other than a tacit admission that a 1440p 570 PPI display is overkill in many cases. You'd expect a drop in image quality to come from blowing up a 1080p image to fit a 1440p display, but somehow it works and there isn't a huge quality loss or letterboxing. This app has a strange placebo vibe to it, but for some reason HTC felt it was necessary.

While Android system updates will still be a problem, HTC has offloaded a lot of its skin onto the Play Store where it ought to be easier to update. HTC's home screen, account infrastructure, voice assistant, mail client, clock app, help app, and camera are all updatable via the Play Store. There's also an "HTC Service Pack" app, which seems to contain odds and ends from the rest of the skin.

We were going to give HTC bonus points on the software update front for being the only OEM with a software update status page, though that page is woefully out of date. It lists the unlocked One M9 and One A9 as not having a Marshmallow update when they totally do. Expect to wait about three months for the next update after Android N is released in the fall.