6 Things the HTC 10 Gets Right—And 4 It Gets Wrong

The 10 doesn't look or feel like the iPhone, but it's clearly meant for the same sort of person who might buy one. By which I mean, people without strong feelings about which phone they should buy, people for whom "iOS or Android" is the only question they ask. The 10 is a straightforward, somewhat uninspiring but entirely unloathable device. This would be fine if HTC executed the everyman design as well as Apple does. Instead, there are too many haphazardly placed buttons and ports, and too few eye-catching detail. The parts that do shine are dulled by those that don't.

Thanks to a USB-C port and a super-fast charger, an impressively efficient Snapdragon 820 processor, and a big 3,000mAh battery, the 10 lasts a day and a half no matter how hard I use it. All told, you're on the charger for 90 minutes every other day. Until someone figures out how to make batteries dramatically better, that's probably the best you can hope for.

You can't make a phone sound great until you can bend the laws of physics. You can, however, make one sound better. HTC's done everything it can in that regard. It supports AirPlay streaming, and high-res audio. It has better-than-average speakers. It'll even calibrate to your specific hearing and headphones. Heck, it even comes with half-decent headphones. It'll never sound incredible, but it's at least getting better.

HTC would really like you to believe in its oversized Ultrapixel camera. In theory, it's a great idea: 12 megapixels, all of them bigger than average, should make for a great camera. The 10's camera is at least decent, and quite fast. The optical image stabilization helps make everything smoother. But it's severely lacking in dynamic range, and photos aren't as sharp as they should be. You can find a better camera, and HTC would do well to ditch its technology and use something else.

Way back when, HTC needed to do all the skinning and software development on top of Android. Now Android is great, and HTC is smartly pulling back. The email client on the 10 is Gmail, the photos app is Google Photos. Even HTC's additions, like the moving-picture Zoes, integrate into Google's apps. The one big change is Themes, an objectively awesome way to tool around. For everyone else, this feels like an Android phone the way Android is meant to be.

Let me rephrase that last one. The unlocked, $699 version of the HTC 10 feels like an unblemished Android phone. But you probably won't buy that one. You'll buy one from your carrier, and HTC is letting those carriers run roughshod over its good ideas. It's not HTC's fault, really, it's AT&T's and Verizon's. But you're still getting bloatware apps, ads popping up everywhere, and a worse experience than anyone deserves.

Your phone is basically a screen and a camera, plus a bunch of stuff required to power the screen and the camera. The 10's screen is terrific. 5.2 inches is a perfect middle-ground size. 2560 pixels tall by 1440 wide is sharp enough that you can't see jagged edges anywhere. Crisp and clean and accurate. Sure, we're hitting marginal returns for screen improvements—they're pretty much all great now—but it's still nice when it gets better.

Beyond some of the camera issues, there's nothing strictly wrong with the 10 unless you're a persnickety design aficionado. (Which you should be.) The HTC 10 is a good phone, with good specs and good software and good performance. Great! But there's nothing about it that makes me want to recommend it over the iPhone, or the Galaxy S7 with its beautiful design and superlative camera, or the LG G5 with its fascinating ideas about the modular future of smartphones. I can't shake the feeling that HTC needed to do something more. Something new. Something mind-blowing. Instead, it just made a good smartphone.