JoltVib

Marginal power returns

I’m fairly confident there’s a kitchen sink inside the HTC One. This phone has everything else, certainly, with nothing but high-end specs across the board. It starts with Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor, a remarkably powerful chip clocked here at 1.7GHz. There’s also 2GB of RAM inside, plus the standard set of radios and sensors: Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, Wi-Fi, DLNA, Miracast, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS — there's even an IR blaster embedded in the power button, just for good measure.

It all makes the One an impressively powerful phone across the board. Its benchmark scores are off the charts (a Quadrant score of 12,189 is more than double most phones from even a few months ago), and in practice the phone is virtually flawless. Even playing Asphalt 7: Heat, an intensive racing game that makes most phones stutter and drop frames, was near-perfect on the One. (Plus, the speakers go a long way toward making you feel like you’re driving a car bigger than something you’d find at Toys R Us.) The only performance problems I had are the same ones no Android phone has solved, like the stuttered and jumpy scrolling in Chrome — I don’t blame HTC for that, I blame Google. But Google’s fixing its problems, and HTC doesn’t really cause any — this phone performs beautifully.

I didn’t get to test an LTE version of the One — I’m using the unlocked European model, and in exchange for actually affordable plans and the ability to use any phone you want, our European friends are for the moment without LTE. I used an AT&T SIM card in the One, though, and found reception and call quality to be as good as I’d expect — if anything, the One picked up signal in a couple of subway stations and cave-like rooms I didn’t expect. The One’s noise cancellation is really good, muting street sounds the iPhone 5 let through, though the sound quality was only average. Speakerphone is really good because the speakers are really loud, but the microphone wasn’t overly impressive. Basically, it’s a cellphone — a good cellphone, maybe, but still a cellphone.

For all the things the phone does well, it doesn’t do much of anything for very long. The combination of a fast processor, high-res screen, and always-updating software is an ugly one for battery life, and indeed I struggled to make the One last a full day. There’s a Power Saver mode that helps a lot, but it also cripples the phone — it turns off most of your wireless connections when you turn off the phone’s screen, for instance, which seems like a steep price a couple extra hours of power. The Sony Xperia Z has a similar feature, but it smartly lets you whitelist apps that can still operate; I'd be much more interested in this feature if I could make sure my email and Twitter were still pushing updates. In more practical use, you’re going to want a charger nearby, since I killed the battery with about ten hours of tweeting, browsing, emailing, and not that much else. This is an unpleasant, sadly unremarkable side effect of big screens and fast phones, but’s a shame nonetheless.

Update: there's been some debate about the battery life on the One, and a few people wondered if I'd gotten a bad unit. HTC shipped me a second, and I re-ran a lot of tests to see if anything was different. First, I ran the Verge Battery Test, our standard test that cycles through a series of popular websites and high-res images with brightness set to 65 percent. The One lasted 4 hours, 48 minutes, a decidedly average score — it's slightly better than poor performers like the Droid DNA (4 hours, 25 minutes), but a long way from our battery life favorites, the Droid RAZR HD (9 hours, 35 minutes) and the RAZR Maxx HD (12 hours, 43 minutes). Streaming the 103-minute Ferris Bueller's Day Off over Wi-Fi from Netflix also burned 58 percent of the device's battery. If you're using it normally (which means relatively lightly), it should last you a whole day, but the One is a decidedly average performer when it comes to battery life.

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