HTC U11 review: This phone has ‘Sense’
In a world dominated by Samsung, Google and the budget-heroes from the likes of OnePlus and Xiaomi, HTC — one of the oldest players in the smartphone market hopes to make it big with their latest flagship offering — the HTC U11. It retains the classic old-school smartphone look with IP67 certification and a Gorilla Glass 3 rear panel that makes it distinct in a sea of understated glass-body smartphones. The U11 sports an impressive 5.5inch 2K Super LCD5 display protected by 3D Gorilla Glass 5, which also enhances the look of the phone. The display produces crisp images with high contrasts and natural colours. HTC has crammed in the flagship Qualcomm SD835 beast clubbed by 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and expandable up to 256GB.
With a custom UI (Sense, based on Android’s Nougat 7.1.1), the U11 sails through almost any task it is given. Multitasking is a breeze too. If you like customising, there’s a theme store to overhaul the menus, icons, wallpapers and fonts. When it comes to photography, the U11 has an ace up its sleeves — a 12MP sensor with an aperture of f/1.7.
Images have a good contrast and produce natural colours while retaining sufficient details. Lowlight photography is also brilliant with negligible noise — no wonder it earned a score of 90 on the DxOMark scale. For its hyped Edge Sense, there’s a set of four pressure-sensitive sensors on each side of the edge. A quick squeeze for one app or shortcut and a long squeeze for another app or shortcut are all that you can use them for.
The U11’s sound quality is crisp and clear and perfectly tuned for bass, especially with the bundled U-sonic earphones. An entire day can be obtained easily from the 3000mAh reservoir, despite intense texting, calling, video streaming, light camera usage or listening to music. Also, you can easily top-up the battery from zero to 100 within an hour and a half.
The HTC U11 is no doubt one of the best smartphones we have seen till date. At `51,990, the U11 ticks all the right boxes for a true flagship.