Big-screened phones are nothing new at this point. Samsung, which currently dominates pretty much every price band of the Android market, wasn’t the first to market but it did prove that the category could be extremely lucrative. The Galaxy Note was a runaway success, leaving other manufacturers racing to play catch-up.
HTC has had a bad few years, and has in the past relied on software customizations to help it distinguish itself in the market. Last year, it tried to project cheap plastic construction as Samsung’s Achilles’ Heel, and introduced the all-metal HTC One. The One should have been a runaway success, with its gorgeous looks, full-HD screen and Snapdragon 600 processor, all of which were either industry firsts or pretty close. Still, the beleaguered Taiwanese company faced a lukewarm response from the market, while its Korean rival raced ahead.
So now, HTC has gone back to doing what everyone else is doing, which is where the One Max comes in. It’s a huge phone, because everyone else is making huge phones. It’s made of plastic, because, well, that’s what everyone else is doing. And it has a fingerprint scanner because, err, that’s what at least one competitor is doing and it might have seemed like a good idea to just toss one in just in case.
Look and feel
The HTC One Max trades on the One’s name and reputation, but unfortunately doesn’t do it any justice. HTC isn’t in a position to create or market a beautifully crafted flagship device right now, and the company has cut a lot of corners in manufacturing the One Max. Although it has a strong family resemblance to the One, this phone is constructed out of plastic like the One Mini. The front face is nearly identical to that of the One, but you’ll immediately notice an unsightly white plastic band around it. Even on the back, it’s clear that the metal pieces are only for decoration. The odd combination of plastic, metal and glass gives this phone a very awkward look. It’s hard to think of this as a premium device when we know its smaller, older sibling is so much better constructed.
The large aluminium backplate pops off when you press down on a tiny tab that’s located, oddly enough, on the phone’s upper left edge where control buttons usually reside. You’ll notice that the backplate doesn’t really sit well in its plastic frame, and the sharp corner nearest to the clasp stays raised enough to be annoying when you hold the phone in your hands. You only ever need to take the panel off to access the SIM and microSD card slots, which seems like a shocking waste. Since the battery isn’t accessible anyway, the entire body could have been a lot thinner and better construction could have been applied if the slots had simply been accessible from the phone’s exterior.
The One Max is pretty bulky, at 217g and over 10mm thick, but its curved back and slim proportions help mask that fact well. You’ll find a prominent camera cutout and sensors along the top of the front panel, and there’s a battery status and notification LED hidden in the speaker grille as well. The power button and volume rocker sit on the right side, with a microUSB data and charging port on the bottom. There’s no camera button, which is perhaps understandable for such an unwieldy device. The left side has only the aforementioned clasp, while the top hosts a standard 3.5mm headset jack as well as an infrared emitter used by some of the bundled apps. Most interesting is the back panel, where the camera and flash share the spotlight with a large square fingerprint reader. Lower down, a set of three electrical contact points seem designed for docking with accessories, though even HTC’s own site doesn’t offer much information about which accessories use them. We’re actually glad to see that HTC has stopped printing giant red Beats Audio logos on the back of its phones-this is perhaps the sole area in which the One Max looks better than the One.
Samsung’s defining feature for its Note line is the S-pen, an active stylus that works in concert with the customized Android UI and a few third-party apps to let users take advantage of the available screen space. HTC has no equivalent feature in either hardware or software, so you’ll be using it with your thumbs just like any other touchscreen phone.
Specifications
On the inside, the HTC One Max finds itself at a disadvantage compared to today’s flagships from competing manufacturers. The SoC is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, which is a step lower in both CPU and graphics performance compared to the Snapdragon 800 used by most of its peers. There’s 2GB of RAM, which is perfectly fine. In practical terms you aren’t likely to notice much difference right now except in the most intensive games and apps, but it’s worth noting for future compatibility.
The screen is sharp and bright, and we had no trouble with it even in sunlight. 1920×1080 is the current standard resolution for premium smartphones and we’re glad to see that HTC has not skimped in this regard. Videos are generally smooth, and viewing angles are as good as anything we’ve ever seen. Games, of course, make the best use of the large surface area. We’re also happy to note that the screen is protected by toughened Gorilla Glass 3.
More noteworthy are the twin front-facing stereo speakers, a feature that the company calls BoomSound. The One Max’s audio output is deep, rich, and clearly audible from several feet away. It might not fill up an entire room, but when held in your hands, this phone will transform the way you experience movies and games. Even simple games like Temple Run really come alive if you can play with the sound turned up. It’s hard going back to the tinny bottom- or rear-firing speakers on most other phones.
As far as connectivity is concerned, the One Max checks most of the right boxes. The latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac is supported, as is Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX audio support. Wireless video streaming is supported using Miracast, and you can use the device as a Wi-Fi hotspot to share your 3G data connection. 4G LTE is supported, though not on the 2.3GHz band that has been adopted in India. The One Max is the sole member of its family to support expandable storage, and you can add up to 64GB using standard microSD cards.
Camera
HTC has continued the practice of rating its high-end cameras in “Ultrapixels”, a word it uses to emphasize the larger physical size of the individual receptors on the sensor surface. First seen on the HTC One, the idea is to allow each pixel to capture more incoming light, thus allowing for superior images in terms of exposure and clarity, especially low-light conditions. While it’s still technically a 4-megapixel unit, HTC equates the amount of data recorded to competing 13-megapixel models. The tradeoff is that images are smaller than the ones taken by competing devices, but HTC says the lack of compression and higher overall quality is more than enough to make up for that.
We aren’t entirely convinced by these arguments. In our testing, the low resolution became apparent in certain situations, especially low-light macros. Larger images tend to look sharper because they’re scaled down on screen, but the One Max had no such headroom to take advantage of. Photos are still fine for sharing on social media and via email, but this isn’t the type of device that will make you feel like you never need a dedicated camera again. Low-light scenes were indeed well lit, but we feel that this alone is not worth the overall compromise, especially considering the calibre of cameras on other manufacturers’ current flagship phones.
The HD test videos we shot with the One Max had an artificial quality about them, and artefacts were visible on the large screen when playing back segments in which we tried to focus on fast-moving foreground objects.
If you like adjusting settings manually, the One Max’s camera app menu offers options for tweaking the exposure, saturation, sharpness, contrast, ISO and white balance. Preset scenes include HDR, panorama and “dual-capture” (which sticks a “selfie” of the user taken with the front camera on top of regular photos). In video mode, you can choose “Fast HD” for 60fps recording, slow motion, and video HDR.
One of HTC’s other headlining features is Zoe, which captures short video clips instead of still photos. This results in short moving pictures that can capture moments more fully, such as spontaneously funny moments. Zoe files aren’t easily sharable to other people and devices, so HTC has included an option to convert them into GIFs.
Software
The One Max runs Android 4.3, though we expect the company to push out an update to 4.4 in a month or two. HTC’s Sense UI 5.5 customization lives on top of the operating system, and thankfully, as opposed to its past efforts, the current version of Sense is completely unobtrusive. Its most notable feature is Blinkfeed, a visual that displays news and social network updates in a tiled format. Blinkfeed was initially intended to replace the home screen, showing fresh updates every time you turn the phone on. Many users found this irritating, and so HTC has responded by allowing you to set it as a secondary home screen or even turn it off entirely. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, you can now sign in to Instagram and Google+ to see even more social updates. There’s an improved mechanism for sorting through available news sources and choose topic areas you’re interested in.
One other tweak worth mentioning is in the Gallery app. There’s a tab called Video Highlights, in which you’ll see a 30-second video clip made out of photos from your collection, including Zoe moving videos. The app automatically puts photos that it deems to be your “highlights” together, but you can deselect ones you don’t want. You can also add a theme, much like the ones found in image filter apps. Finally, you can add a soundtrack of your choice and decide whether the images play chronologically or in a random order. Once done, you can share the highlights video via all the usual social networks.
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