Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HTC U Ultra Rant: Skip this One!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the brand new htc? U ultra, and it is definitely the shiniest phone of all time – and this happens to also be htc’s first big smartphone of 2017 – and it’s coming to the us with a price tag of 749. So this is definitely a high-end flagship, smartphone and people who buy 700 android smartphones. These are the pickiest of the bunch. Those are the biggest enthusiasts people who want the biggest baddest phone they can possibly get. So this seems to be what htc is setting the tone with those people with so it’s rocking pretty high-end specs, the snapdragon 821 through adreno 530 gpu, four gigs of ram and quality materials. All around i mean you haven’t seen. Many phones like this.
That are basically a mirror finish on the back: it’s glass and metal. It’S got the htc skin over android 7.0. Some sweet colors are available, and the cherry on top is, of course, how great this thing looks. So this thing might be a sleeper of a great phone, but the more i look into it.
The more i use this thing, the more i understand, the ultra, the more i realized this seems to be a really poor use of space. This is a big phone. I mean you look at its footprint compared to things like the iphone 7 plus the galaxy note 7, and even the pixel xl, which stands for extra large and is bigger than all of those and even others, with even smaller displays. It’S bigger than all of them. And it’s still eight millimeters thick, so it’s also definitely not trying to be a super thin phone in any way either. So it seems like there should be all the room in the world to throw in every possible flagship feature and perk right.
Well, you’ve probably already realized this, even if it’s in your head without me, saying it, the back of this phone definitely resembles another certain rival’s flagship, not the galaxy s7, the galaxy s6 back when there was a big hump on the back for the camera and the Galaxy s6: that’s when it looked the most like the ultra, but of course the next year samsung made the phone a little bit thicker, with all its new upgrades and bigger battery, etc and ended up with a much smaller camera hump on the back. There should be no need for such a big hump on an even bigger phone of the ultra, so the camera bump in an already huge phone to me, seems like a poor use of space and for the record just having a camera bump. Isn’T always a big deal, but on the ultra it is and then there’s the headphone jack or the black of a headphone jack yeah, no headphone jack at all in this huge phone. Now i understand usb type-c is great and it’s the future and everything, but apple’s main reason for getting rid of the headphone jack in the iphone. Besides, courage was to save precious space in such a compact interior of a phone. Other manufacturers have since continued putting headphone jacks on their phones because they don’t need that space and the portless future isn’t quite here yet in htc.
You definitely could have also, but you didn’t, for some reason seems like a poor use of space and then the battery, the htc. U ultra has a 3 000 milliamp hour battery, which doesn’t seem that bad, but for context, yeah something’s a little bit off here. You would think that a phone this huge and this thick with this much internal space would have all the room in the world for maybe a two-day battery life, maybe the biggest non-removable battery they could possibly fit. But that was a missed opportunity here, and this phone is stuck with average battery life at best seems like a poor use of space, and even if i get a little picky these, these buttons down here at the bottom of the phone have some pretty small touch Targets – and i can’t help but think that something just looks a little bit off about them – a bit out of place to the point where it took me a little bit of time to actually get used to pressing them in the right spot.
With a screen and a phone, this huge htc could have easily gone with on-screen customizable software buttons, or at least given that option somewhere in the menus, it’s 2017, but they didn’t. Instead, they went with these small permanent capacitive buttons way down at the bottom. Now they could, if they wanted to drop that in a software update. So i won’t rag too hard on that if they want to enable it, but maybe they just wanted to have buttons on the side flanking a fingerprint reader, because they just really wanted a fingerprint reader, which is cool.
You can put one there, but they managed to put one of the smaller ones on any flagship phone. Even on one of the biggest phones out, there seems like a poor use of space. This 750 phone is also not water resistant and with a body and all the internal space, this big, you would think they would be able to find the space to put the seams and the seals to make sure that it’s water resistant. Just like a lot of the smaller flagships out there, but they didn’t seems like a poor use of space and if you look in the sides and the corners of this display, especially up at the top left corner right underneath the webcam you get. Some serious light bleed and i hardly ever notice actual light bleed in any flagship smartphone.
I don’t know if it’s, because in this phone the back lighting is too close to the display panel or if the insides are too clumped up there. Next to the webcam. To get that space evenly lit, i don’t know what the problem is, but it is actually noticeable and that rarely is a problem for me on smartphones. So it seems like a poor use of space. Again, it’s also a huge phone with tiny speakers at the bottom sure it’s a stereo pair, but it’s definitely not the loudest and it’s definitely tinny at high volumes, poor use of space.
You see what i’m getting at. Also most glass back. Phones like this have wireless charging. That’S why they do it.
If you have a metal phone, you can’t do wireless charging, because wireless charging doesn’t work through metal. But if you have this sort of a big glass back and a huge amount of internal space, you would think you could at least have wireless charging, but it doesn’t pory space now, even all of that isn’t the end of the world. I mean there’s phones that are also lacking all those things i just talked about, but they’re all also less than this price. So i think at 750 dollars in the us, it’s pretty hard sell.
I mean people who are buying phones at that price are looking for something really special and i don’t think you’re getting that here i mean there are definitely some good promising things about this phone that have me psyched for htc’s next phone. The camera in this guy is really good. It’S a 12 megapixel ultra pixel camera and has face detection. Auto focus.
That’S really fast and photos look very good. They can almost go toe-to-toe with the google pixel, so i’m really impressed with that. It also has expandable storage, which is definitely rare in most smartphones and appreciated in a high-end flagship, and the second display up at the top. While it is a shameless rip of the lg v20, it’s also kind of useful, sometimes like the one in the lg v20. You get some app shortcuts up there if you want, i kind of like it when the display is off and i raised to wake, and i just get that little bit of notifications and the time and the date. That’S my favorite feature of the second display, but you know: if you don’t want to use it, you can turn it off as well. So there is good stuff here, but aside from new htc software, there is almost nothing for 750 bucks that this phone does, that you can’t get somewhere else better or cheaper. So with that i’ll say skip this one and you could pretty easily wait for the htc 11 to come out pretty soon or just grab a galaxy s8 when that comes out or an lg g6 or pretty much any other 700 smart fund, which will be a Better use of space than this one, so that’s been, it hope you enjoyed, feel free to leave a comment if you agree or if you have some other stuff to share thanks for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace .