A funny thing happened while I was testing the new HTC 10 ($699 for 32GB unlocked): I couldn't stop listening. HTC's latest flagship is the best smartphone for audio I've heard in a long time, although you need to pair it with some really good headphones for the advantages to come through. It's also the first Qualcomm Snapdragon 820-powered unlocked phone available in the US, which makes it the most powerful unlocked phone on the market. When you combine these benefits with a sleek design and attractive software enhancements, you get our Editor's Choice for unlocked phones and a great choice when offered by carriers, superseded only by the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge ($399.99 at Amazon) .
Physical Features and Battery
The HTC 10 ($648.00 at Verizon) feels like a big slab of metal at 5.74 by 2.83 by 0.35 inches (HWD) and 5.68 ounces, although it's actually smaller than the Galaxy S7 Edge (5.94 by 2.86 by 0.30 inches); all that matte aluminum gives the impression that it's bigger than it is.
The front of the phone is mostly a 5.2-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 Super LCD 5. It looks about as bright as the AMOLED display on the Samsung Galaxy S7 ($199.99 at Samsung) , but lacks the intense contrast. It isn't always on, but as we saw on the LG G5 ($624.00 at Verizon) , that feature doesn't work well on LCDs anyway. Below the screen, there's a combination home button/fingerprint sensor, which is flanked by capacitive back and multitasking buttons. The body is slightly water-resistant, but not waterproof—don't dunk it.
HTC says the fingerprint sensor is the fastest in the industry, and we found it to be slightly faster than the Galaxy S7's, unlocking the phone in 0.4-second as opposed to 0.5. In practice, though, the speed difference isn't really noticeable. The sensor is noticeably more accurate than the S7's, though.
Similar Products
Samsung Galaxy S7
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
LG G5
Google Nexus 6P (Unlocked)
Motorola Moto X Pure Edition (Unlocked)
Apple iPhone 6s (Unlocked)
Google Nexus 5X (Unlocked)
The back of the phone looks like someone heard that iPhones have chamfered edges and said, "You say they like chamfers? I'll give you a chamfer!" It's an ultra chamfera—a relatively large, shiny, angled slide that comes down to a more conventional right angle at the edge of the phone. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it definitely stands out. The back is domed enough that the phone will rock on a table if you push it. On the side, the power button is ridged to make it easy to find, like the one on the HTC One A9 ($261.27 at Amazon) . That's a really useful touch.
The phone has a microSD card slot that had no trouble with a 200GB Lexar card, and it charges with USB-C and Qualcomm's Quickcharge 3.0 technology. HTC says the phone can charge 50 percent of its 3,000mAh battery in 30 minutes.
Battery life is good. We got 6 hours, 4 minutes of video streaming time, which is solid, if not up to the Galaxy S7's 9 hours. That isn't the whole picture, though: HTC's software bleeds somewhat less battery in standby than Samsung's does, and the phone comes with an app called Boost+ that sips power by reducing the screen resolution when you're playing games. After seven and a half hours in standby, a Samsung Galaxy S7's battery had dropped by 8-10 percent, while the HTC 10's battery had only dropped by 2-3 percent.
Calling and Networking
The unlocked model of the HTC 10 supports LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/12/13/17/20/28/29/30 and LTE Category 9, which means it will get the fastest speeds and best coverage that AT&T and T-Mobile have to offer. We found this true in our tests, where LTE speeds and coverage were on par with the Galaxy S7 Edge. Qualcomm's TruSignal antenna tuner, introduced late last year, recovers from connection drops much more quickly than last year's devices did. It will also work perfectly on Canadian networks, although it lacks CDMA so it can't authenticate on Sprint or Verizon. For those carriers, you'll have to buy the models the carriers offer directly.
Wi-Fi performance is fine, although it isn't up to Galaxy S7 levels. We got about half the speed we saw on a Galaxy S7 at various distances from our Verizon FiOS test router: 20Mbps down instead of 40Mbps, for instance, or 2Mbps instead of 4Mbps. It was still usable, especially at closer distances. A software update we received in the middle of our testing process bumped speeds up—they were originally even lower—so this may be something that can be further improved in firmware.
Call quality is very good, thanks to vigorous speakers and excellent LTE connectivity. Test calls were clear, loud, and sharp, and the bottom-ported speakerphone was easy to hear outside. Noise cancellation was also effective. The phone supports VoLTE and Wi-Fi calling, and it will support T-Mobile's enhanced EVS codec for even better call quality in a software update, HTC said.
Software
The HTC 10 runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow with HTC's latest version of Sense. HTC said it's trying to slim down duplicate apps, and that effort is appreciated. The apps HTC kept are a mix of its own and Google's: HTC's camera, Google Photos, HTC Mail, Google Calendar, and Google Play Music, for instance. The only obvious bloatware comes in the form of apps for Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, which you'll probably use anyway. This is on the unlocked version, of course. Expect US carrier versions to be loaded down with redundant carrier apps.
There are two major, obvious changes from Google's stock Android here. First, if you swipe to the left of the home screen, you get HTC's Flipboard-like News Republic aggregator. And second, in HTC's Theme Store you can download new Freestyle themes, which are so open that they're almost disturbing. There's no icon grid. You can place icons, widgets, and stickers (oversized icons) willy-nilly. The one Freestyle theme available to start is travel-themed, and way too low-contrast, but it's safe to say this is the least iPhone-like layout I've seen in a long time.
Of the 32GB of internal storage, about 25GB is available. You can always add a microSD card, and unlike the Galaxy S7 or the LG G5, this phone supports Google's Adoptable Storage mode to make the card look like internal storage.
In terms of performance, the HTC 10 is on par with other Snapdragon 820 devices like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the LG G5, with one notable exception: If you use the HTC 10's Boost+ software to knock screen resolution down to 1080p in games, you'll boost your frame rates, too.
Listen Up
HTC is well-known for awesome audio experiences. It introduced front-facing BoomSound speakers on the HTC One M7 three years ago, and has since paid attention to things that really make a difference, like headphone amps, as opposed to things that are largely inaudible, like 32-bit DACs.
The HTC 10 doesn't have front-facing speakers. Instead, it has a front-facing tweeter up by the earpiece, and a woofer that doubles as the speakerphone along the bottom. This creates mono sound that's a little hard to measure the volume of, because it's radiating from the whole phone rather than coming out of a specific point. It sounds less tinny than most phones, but not room-filling.
But when you plug in headphones: Wow. The 1-volt headphone amp, more powerful than in the Galaxy S7 or the Apple iPhone 6s (599.99 with code VZWDEAL at Verizon) , can drive high-end headphones such as the Bowers & Wilkins P5 ($249.95 at Amazon) like no other phone can. The payoff is in gorgeously round, textured, detailed sound, whether you're listening to pop, jazz, or classical. It only gets better as you turn the volume up. The difference is less noticeable in mediocre headphones, so it pays to invest (and you'll have to, since HTC doesn't include any headphones at all). Compared with the HTC 10, audio through the GS7 sounds flattened and subdued.
Headphone audio quality is further improved by a Personal Audio Profile (PAP), my favorite feature Samsung abandoned in the Galaxy S6. PAP surveys your aural faculties and enhances the frequencies where your hearing is slowly fading. The result for me was discovering that there are bass notes in some of my favorite songs that I just hadn't been noticing at all. I almost can't work when using the phone to listen to music, it's that good.
But it gets even better! This is the first Android phone to officially support Apple's AirPlay, the formerly proprietary Wi-Fi streaming protocol that a number of wireless speakers support. In a panel in the settings menu, you can quickly connect to Chromecast, Miracast, and AirPlay devices. The phone can stream video via Chromecast and Miracast, but only do audio through AirPlay. That's fine. It's a cherry on top of the best audio playback phone available.
Camera and Video
The story with the HTC 10's camera is a little bit more mixed than with the audio, and is where the Galaxy S7 pulls ahead a bit.
The HTC 10 can shoot stills in RAW or JPEG, its camera app has some Pro Mode controls (shown below), and it can record up to 4K video at 30 frames per second. It has built-in slow-motion and hyperlapse modes, too. Both of its cameras have optical image stabilization to smooth out videos. Sticking with the audio theme, it also records high-quality audio up to twice as loud as other phones without clipping.
The main camera is a 12-megapixel unit with 1.55µm pixels, which are larger than the 1.4µm pixels in the Samsung Galaxy S7. That should make for better low-light performance, right? Alas, no. The Galaxy S7's f/1.7 aperture, slightly larger than the HTC 10's f/1.8, along with its added focus pixels seem to make a difference.
In good light, photos look great. The differences come out when the lights go down. On a cloudy day, the S7's shots look just a bit brighter and sharper. Very low-light shots on the HTC 10 are a bit noisier than the S7, but more importantly, the phone has trouble focusing in situations where the S7 has no issues, and focus in general is slower. Tapping to focus doesn't change the exposure, which can make taking photos with a dark foreground and a bright background difficult. In addition, the HTC 10 would also occasionally throw an error about me blocking the laser autofocus when I wasn't; HTC says this will be improved in a software update.
The front-facing, 5-megapixel camera, with 1.34µm pixels, has good if somewhat noisy performance. It's a little soft in low light, but at least it doesn't do the irritating super-smoothing thing that Samsung and LG phones do, and it's less noisy than the iPhone 6s.
Comparisons and Conclusions
The HTC 10 is the best music phone on the market, and a strong performer all around. Its solid, all-metal body, quick performance, and fast fingerprint scanner make for an elegant experience. Aside from the audio quality, though, we still like the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge a bit better. It packs an even bigger screen into an only slightly wider body, it has a larger battery, and more importantly, it has a better camera. Low-light camera performance is a hugely important feature, and the S7 and S7 Edge lead the pack right now.
That said, LG and Samsung hurt themselves by not making unlocked versions of the G5 and the Galaxy S7 available. If you're looking for a high-end unlocked phone with no carrier bloatware in the US, your best choices were previously the Google Nexus 6P ($149.95 at B&H Photo Video) and the Motorola Moto X Pure Edition . The HTC 10 outpaces those devices. Its Snapdragon 820 chipset is much faster, and its newer modem handles connection drops far better than the other models. While it isn't running stock Google Android, HTC's Sense has relatively few superfluous apps and is full of new, useful features like AirPlay support. While the HTC 10 is also more expensive than its competitors at $699, you're getting value for that money. That makes the HTC 10 our new Editor's Choice for unlocked phones.
The HTC 10 is the best Android phone for audiophiles and it offers plenty for everyone else too. This could be HTC's big comeback.
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