Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HTC U11: The Squeeze Phone?!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and this phone is already come back player of the year for htc for 2017.. You already remember how poor of a use of space and money uh the ultra was just a couple months ago. Well, less than six months later we get this at a very similar price and it’s the u11 so from the outside. You might not see that much of a difference. You know same shiny, blue body, same thick, rounded design, same lack of a headphone jack. It seems at first glance really similar because it is, but as far as packing features and specs into this phone, they cleaned up real nice. So to run right down the spec sheet, you have android 7.1.1 with the same htc software. On top it’s a snapdragon 835 with the adreno 540 four gigs of ram a 3 000 milliamp hour battery a 5.5 inch quad hd display 64 gigs of storage expandable via microsd and a 12 megapixel f 1.7 camera with ois. Now specs aren’t everything they don’t tell the whole story, but here they do a pretty good job and if we head down that spec list again besides, just of course the very impressive numbers, this phone gets a lot of things right so with android.
It’S already on the latest version later than most phones, it’s 7.1.1. So that’s a good sign and hopefully it gets updates. Plus it has all the same features. Htc has decided to add on top of android the snapdragon 835 chipset we already know has been awesome in other phones, plus four gigs of ram, so we’re expecting and getting top-notch performance here best in class and it’s absolutely one of the smoothest and most responsive android Phones out there right now, i’m just a little less confident with that full-time smoothness lasting as long as something like from a stock android phone, but i’m still very impressed with how htc’s animations just glide for the most part, they use really short, simple animations and that’s What you want to see this thing flies: it’s got a 3 000 milliamp hour battery, not the biggest number in the world, but we’re seeing this thing: outperform: phones with bigger cells and last comfortably all day, thanks to optimization and that’s super impressive, considering the display and That display is a 5.5 inch, 1440p lcd display that gets pretty bright.
It’S definitely not the brightest and it can struggle outdoors. So i admit that, but still high pixel density and great colors anytime, you’re not outside, is going to get a thumbs up there. Storage is all there 64 gigs right out the box with a micro, sd card slot and the camera has been absolutely killing it.
It’S a 12 megapixel sensor, big, wide, open, f, 1.7 aperture and optical image. Stabilization really matters and helps it a lot in low light, plus it has that same snapdragon 835 as the oneplus 5. So it’s doing auto instant hdr and this thing has been taking some killer shots, so htc can stop right.
There they’ve already wiped the floor with their previous phone, pretty much no reason to buy the ultra anymore, but i haven’t even gotten to the headlining feature of this phone. So the main major headlining feature of the u11 is a custom shortcut. That’S mapped to squeezing the phone it’s called edge sense, so this is for real, so instead of a custom button like an extra key or an edge display feature or anything like that, htc has crammed pressure sensors into the size of this phone, specifically in the lower Half on both sides, so you can squeeze the phone to launch any app of your choice.
It can be the assistant or the camera or your instagram or whatever you want really or you can have squeeze to take screenshots or toggle. The flashlight or instantly start a voice, recording or turn wi-fi hotspot on. So it’s completely custom.
It can do a lot of things. The question is squeezing it is that a gimmick or is that legit? Well, i think that all really will depend on how your hands wrap around this phone and how natural you think it feels to just squeeze the phone in the middle of using it. It can be kind of a weird thing, depending on the way you hold the phone to squeeze it to launch something. Maybe a bit unnatural. The phone doesn’t flex at all, it’s metal, but htc actually does let you calibrate how hard you want to have to squeeze before it activates edge sense. So there’s 10 different pressure levels so naturally, naturally you’d think you’d want to set it as low as possible.
So you don’t have to grip the phone super hard just to launch something, but the thing is: if you set the squeeze value too low, you can actually accidentally start triggering it when you’re just picking up the phone off a table. I had it happen to me a couple of times it can be too sensitive or even sometimes, when you’re just pulling out your pocket. It’S not the end of the world, but it still does launch that stuff accidentally. But if you set the squeeze level too high, then you need like a two-handed vice grip on the phone just to squeeze it hard enough to trigger it and that’s not natural at all. So you kind of have to have it somewhere in the middle got to make sure you calibrate it right. I found it best at around level four or five, and i also tried a bunch of different grips.
Not everyone holds the phone the same way, but basically, if you do squeeze just one side of the phone that will activate it too, so you can squeeze one side or the other on the lower half that’ll be fine. So while it was definitely weird at first for me to squeeze the phone instead of just pressing a custom button or launching my app, it did pretty quickly get pretty easy. With that mid-level squeeze pressure, the more i got into it, the more i got used to it. You can enable advanced mode which lets you set different shortcuts to a quick squeeze versus a long squeeze kind of like a single press versus a long press.
If it was a button and you can really dig down and customize a whole lot of functionality just in squeezing this phone, so if you’re into it, this phone is already a pretty complete package. And then you add the squeeze feature on top of all of that and it becomes really interesting. I would buy and use this phone if i was more of a fan of htc software, but i’m not a more of a pure android person, but this it’s not perfect. This phone is definitely not perfect, there’s still no headphone jack. That’S still a poor use of space, it’s still super shiny and very reflective, and i think the anodized matte blue, look around the edges would have looked way hotter for the entire back of the phone, but we still have this mirror and the fingerprint reader is still Annoyingly, small and the bezels are still annoyingly big. So it’s not perfect, but this is a way better phone than six months ago and i think they have the right idea trying to do something new with interaction but still trying to make it feel somewhat. Natural kind of just in the grip of while you’re using the phone every day, but that’ll, of course, all depend on whether you guys buy this phone or not, and what you guys think. So let me know what you think is this the whole squeeze thing a gimmick: will it be dead in a year or is it the next big thing? Is it gon na catch on? Your guess is as good as mine, but feel free to leave a comment below and then come back to it in a year and see if you’re, right or not. So that’s pretty much it. Thank you for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace.
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