So HTC finally pulled the sheet off the One on Tuesday, at those simultaneous events in New York and London, and I've spent the last two days going back and forth on how I feel about it. Short version: I like it more than I expected to, and the one thing everybody's arguing about (the camera) is the thing I find most interesting, not because of the megapixel number but because HTC basically told the entire industry its favorite marketing stat is a lie.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it. The One (internally it was M7 in all the leaks, and yes I fell for every single one of those leaks) has a 4.7-inch 1080p display, an aluminum unibody body that HTC is calling "zero gap" construction, front-facing stereo speakers they're branding BoomSound, and a new version of Sense with a live-tile-ish home screen called BlinkFeed sitting in front of everything. And then there's the camera: 4 megapixels. Four. In 2013, when every other flagship is racing toward 13.
HTC's pitch is that they made the individual sensor pixels physically bigger (they're calling it UltraPixel, obviously, because nothing can just have a normal name anymore) so each one captures more light, which should mean better low-light shots and less noise, at the cost of raw resolution for cropping and huge prints. On paper I actually buy the logic. Bigger pixels genuinely do gather more light, that's not marketing fluff, that's just how sensors work. What bugs me is that they spent three years letting Samsung and everyone else win the spec sheet war on megapixel count, and now that they're behind they've decided the whole race was pointless. Convenient timing. I'd respect it more if a company had made this argument from a position of strength instead of retreating into it.
The build quality is the part nobody's really disputing, though. Going aluminum unibody instead of the plastic Samsung's been shipping (my Galaxy Nexus creaks if I look at it wrong) is a real, tangible upgrade, and from the press photos it looks like it's aiming pretty directly at the iPhone 5 in terms of finish. Whether that's a compliment or an insult probably depends on which forum you're reading. BlinkFeed I'm more skeptical about. It's a news-and-social aggregator baked into the home screen, which sounds nice until you remember Flipboard already exists, does the same thing, and you can just not put it as your default launcher screen if you don't want it there. Forcing it onto the leftmost home panel feels like the kind of decision a product meeting makes at 4pm on a Friday.
No SD card slot, no removable battery. That's the one that actually annoys me, not because I swap batteries constantly (I don't, my last three phones have all been sealed units and I've survived) but because HTC seems to be positioning this as a premium flagship and then quietly cutting a feature that used to be table stakes on Android specifically because it wasn't on iPhones. If you're going to copy Apple's industrial design, fine, copy the industrial design. Don't also copy the storage philosophy nobody asked for.
I haven't touched one in person yet, obviously, everybody who's posted hands-on impressions so far got them at the actual events, and HTC hasn't said exactly when it's shipping beyond "March," which in phone-launch language could mean anything. I'll believe a release date when I see a preorder page. Given HTC's last couple of years, count me cautiously interested rather than sold.
(Also, entirely separate note: if you haven't read the Mandiant report on the Chinese military hacking unit that came out this same week, go find it. It's not really a "gadget" story so I'm not going to try to cram it into this post, but it's the most detailed public accounting I've seen of a state-sponsored hacking operation, down to the building. Worth your lunch break even if none of this is your usual beat.)
Anyway. UltraPixel is a bet, BlinkFeed is a maybe, the metal body is the one thing I'm fully on board with already. We'll see what actual units look like once they're in people's hands instead of press kits.