HTC One S: My Personal Device

HTC has gone through a number of changes over the years. Some good and some bad. For the most part they've done well in the mobile industry. Especially with their current flagship line, the One series. I personally own the T-mobile One S and in my opinion, it's a great device. It has 1.5ghz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, a gig of RAM, a 4.3" qhd amoled display with a pentile matrix,  and Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich with HTC's Sense 4 running on top of it. You can run custom roms with Android 4.0.4 and Sense 4.1, but I'll save the hacking for another post.

HTC has been known for their excellent build quality and the One S is no exception. It has aluminum uni-body design with beautiful gorilla glass 2 display, and is only 0.31" thin. It feels great in your hand, but with this incredibly clean design comes a few sacrifices. The One S does not have any option for expandable storage so you are stuck with the 16gbs of on board memory. It also does not have a removable battery. That, to me, would not be a problem if the battery was bigger. It only has a 1650mAh battery....yeah, that's not very big. The battery life is alright but I just don't see why they haven't increased the battery size. With higher resolutions displays that are getting bigger everyday, you'll need a bigger battery to compensate. I hate to compare companies, but the Galaxy S III has a 2100mAh battery that is also removable, just sayin...

One of the best things about this device, and the series as well, is the camera. It has a numerous amount of great features such a burst mode, HD 1080p video recording, the ability to capture still pictures while shooting video, and much more. The pictures are clear and crisp in most lighting conditions, with the except of very dim situations. It's the best camera on a phone that I've ever used. 

Like I said before, this phone is running HTC's latest version of Sense UI, of which I am a fan. Although it is much more memory hungry than stock Android, I think if they toned down the code a little it could be a much more viable option. A lot of people find it too obtrusive and in your face, but I happen to enjoy a lot of the little customizations and features they've added to ICS. 

Things such as the lock screen giving you direct access to the apps in your doc, music playback, and text messages, they've made it much easier to add widgets to your home screens, and the animations are very much toned down from previous versions of Sense.

One gripe I do have with the custom UI is the way they've changed the recent apps menu. 

Although it looks nice, the style of the menu makes closing recent apps unnecessarily complicated; and only being able to see one app at a time and having to swipe them upwards, makes it much time consuming and frustrating.

The newest version of HTC's keyboard is an improvement over previous versions as well. The buttons are large and it is easy to type on. But their implementation of Trace input, which is a Swype rip off, is just not up to the level of usability that Swype is. It's very difficult to input the word you're aiming for if you are not 100% with your 'trace'. It is also quite cumbersome to go back and change a word that you've already input. One of the most useless features about the keyboard are the small directional arrows at the bottom. If nothing else, for me, these are simply a guard rail so as not to accidentally press the home button while typing. 

Over all, this a great device; and one of the 2 best phones in T-mo's current line up. Does it have flaws? Yes. But that doesn't mean it should be over looked. If I could suggest one thing to HTC, I would tell them put in bigger batteries. Other than that, this phone is awesome. 

If you would like to know any other detail, hit me up in the comments or on twitter @tbc_lain.