ocaholic - HTC One S - Smartphones

HTC One S

Published by Marc Büchel on 14.05.12

At a first glance the HTC One S seems to be a good compromise when you look at price/performance ratio. There is a very good display, a quick processor and good battery life. What does one want more?

HTCs One S comes with a unibody chassis made from aluminium. It feels very good in the hands and it also has great grip. Unfortunately there is no removable back cover with the One S. Therefore it's not possible to exchange the battery. The micro SIM card can be found the top part of the device. Furthermore the One S offers 12 Gigabyte internal storage. Through a cooperation with Dropbox you get an additional 25 gigabyte online storage for two years.

Camera, Display and Audio

Like with the One X it is possible to take nice photos with the One S. The eight megapixel camera takes crisp and vivid pictures. Where it gets difficult is when there is direct sunshine and big differences in brightness. In this case the camera shows overexposure. If we want to belive HTC marketing then the flash has been improved. In fact they really did a good job. Using the falsh let's you take better pictures then with older phones from HTC. The pictures are not only sharper they also have more vivid colors.

It is the very first time that HTC uses a Super-AMOLED display in one of their smartphones. Regarding quality it is at least as good as the ones you can find in Samsungs Galaxy S2 or Galaxy Nexus. For exmple the contrast ration is on a very high level and also the black tones are superb. Furhtermore there rich colours, which is typical for Super-AMOLED displays. Unfortunately HTC makes use of a PenTile Matrix, which lets you see discoloring on each edge of the display. But to see them one really has to look closely.

Two Cores from Qualcomm

With the HTC One S you get a 1.5 Gigahertz dual core processor from Qualcomm. It's being manufactured at TSMC using their latest 28 Nanometer process technology. Therefore it should offer good efficiency and good battery life. In fact with the One S you can talk for almost five and half hours on the phone and you can surf for almost five hours in the internet. Qualcomms new "Krait" SoC really is a quick thing. Running Vellamo benchmark suite we saw an anstonishing score of 2400 points, which is more than twice as much than what Samsungs Galaxy S2 has to offer. That there is a lot of power under the bonnet can be noticed when you do browsing or when you load applications. Everything is really quick and it doesn't matter if you load webpages via WiFi or HSPA+. Compared to other devices the One S is seriously quick.

Userinterface

HTCs Sense userinterface is one of the most intuitive. For Andoird 4 Ice Cream Sandwich HTC has made quite a few tweaks. The latest version comes for example with an option in the context menu of the browser to deactivate flash. There are quite a few additions like this. Furhtermore HTC has overworked the recent Apps button. The first item displayed is now the App you used most recently. Another nead addition is concerns the widget. If you press the display a bit longer and then select the widgets you can see that there is now a preview.

Conclusion

One of the highlights you get with the One S is its processors. Although there are "only" two cores it es seriously quick. Furthermore there is the overworked Sense userinterface which you get with the One S. We really like the new features they've added. Something else that has received treatment is the camera. The eight megapixel sensor combined with the software lets you take nice and color rich pictures. It's also pracitcal that it take only little time until the camera is ready. With 1650 mAh capacity the battery offers good battery life.
These days the HTC costs CHF 520.- (est. 433 Euros). For this kind of money you get a state of the art dual core smartphone with a 4.3 inch display and a high quality aluminium unibody chassis.

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