T-mobile's HTC One S Review

The HTC One S represents a lot to HTC, who looks to get back to being one of the favorites among the Android base. Focusing on one high-end line, the One line represents that very same effort from HTC to release quality products, instead of many products lacking quality.

The One line is comprised of various devices and one of the first to arrive in the US, and Puerto Rico, is the One S from T-mobile. It will be available tomorrow at T-mobile stores.

Thanks to Tecnético I’ve had the chance to test it since last week and these are my impressions.

Design 

The design of the One S is one of the most attractive designs I’ve seen from HTC and I think that, after the Sensation, they are the best of the company. The aluminum body of the One S is greyed-blue, very thin (7.8mm) and it is surprisingly light, it feels like you have nothing in you hands. 

The size and type of screen is 4.3” qHD (960x540) Super AMOLED, covered with Gorilla Glass. The size is just about right and feels very good when using it.

The screen is Pentile, which is a major no-no for me. With an extra green pixel, the edges and details do not look that crisp. This is the same type of screen found on the Motorola Droid Razr and Galaxy Nexus.

The rest of the design has the speaker for calls at the top next to the front-facing camera, on the left edge we have the micro USB input, volume buttons on the left edge and the power button and headphone jack at the top edge.

On the back we have the camera and LED flash.

Hardware

The One S is equipped with a 1.5GHz “dual-core” Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM memory and 16GB of storage. It runs on T-mobile’s HSPA+ 42 mbps network.

Camera

The camera is definitely one of the best in the market, if not the best. The camera is 8 megapixels and records 1080p Full HD on video, same as the iPhone 4S.

But HTC did something good, they created something called ImageSense. With it they were capable to give the camera sensors the right software in order to take great pictures.

Image taken with HTC One S

Not only that, you can press and hold the shutter button and it will take continues photos, without the need of activating a “burst mode” specifically for that; and the time in between shots is amazingly short.

ImageSense offers a variety of filters to give different effects to the pictures.

Something I found very useful was to activate “Instant Upload” on Dropbox, that gives you 23GB of free space once you sign in to Dropbox on your HTC One S, and it uploaded all my pictures directly to my photos folder and were already on my Mac when I got home.

Software

The HTC One S runs Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with the overlying Sense 4. This version of Sense is much lighter and doesn’t hinder the experience of using ICS.

Because of this, I didn’t experienced the lagging or freezing often associated with Android devices.

Something that must be noted about Sense is how horrible the icons look, specifically those of  “copy” and “paste”. They simply damaged the visual experience of ICS.

Screenshot "cut", "copy" and "paste" icons

When I comes to audio, the One S comes with Beats Audio and its supposed to give a superb quality to music. But if you don’t have Beats Audio headphone, you will only experience a boost in volume and bass that are far from superb audio. 

Performance

The HTC One S is one of the fastest devices I’ve come to test. In some of the tests I performed, it is even faster than the Galaxy Nexus.

Benchmark test on HTC One S

Battery life is much better than I initially thought; under moderate use it lasted from morning until night without charging. 

But of course, if you are planning to have a session of recording 1080p video, battery life will suffer and it will last much less.

Conclusion 

The HTC One S is, without a doubt, the best “smartphone” T-mobile has to offer at this time. Good performance, fast, great camera and design that displays what HTC wants to show up, a quality product.

Even with the Pentile display and Beats Audio working only for Beats headphones, the One S still is the best alternative available at T-mobile.