HTC One After One Week

It’s now a week after I bought a HTC One to replace my iPhone 4.  I can summarize the experience: I’m getting my photos off of my iPhone 4 now so I can wipe it to sell it on.

What I Like

It didn’t take me too long to figure out Android.  My only experiences with Android had been in airport electronics stores and that never went well … come to think of it … no “hands on demo” seems to work well outside of a Microsoft or an Apple store.

All the apps I wanted are there plus more.  As you might know, podcasts are important to me, and I was sorted in minutes, managing my subscriptions with no arbitrary regional, fictitious licensing, or technical issues. 

I connected up to Office 365 and all my mail, calendar, and contact items were on the phone in minutes.  I switched from the default browser to Chrome and was good.  I’ve not synced that with my PCs yet – where I’ve been switching to Chrome from the crash-happy IE10. 

Live tiles?  I have a page with some widgets pinned for Audible, my alarms, sleep mode, airplane mode, and the podcast player.  Anything else, an old fashioned icon does just nicely.

32 GB of storage is nice to have.  No worrying about filling up 16 GB … my iPhone 4 is a 16 GB model.  I’d hate to be buying that sort of phone now … partly why I did rule out the otherwise nice looking Nokia Lumia 925, and absolutely why I ruled out the S4 (Google variant won’t be released outside the USA due to h/w & network requirements).

The handset is good.  Reception is good, it works perfectly well with my Parrot bluetooth, and although it’s around 4.8” (no comic book store guy-style corrections, thank you) in size, it’s a slim phone and it fits nicely in my pocket.  T|he only issue was that it was hard to distinguish from my HTC 8x WP8 handset for work.

What I Don’t Like

The battery life could be better.  It does drain pretty damned quickly when being used.  It also doesn’t correctly predict the Euro Millions lottery numbers.  I should hate the phone for that, really.

So far, so good.