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welcome to my video about the HTC1 Max this phone review will be a little bit
shorter than most of mine because it's pretty much a phone that I've reviewed
before unlike the One Mini with its mini
size and Mini specs compared to the regular one the one Max is and I suppose
this was self-explanatory um a Max siiz
version of the one there's no massive change in the specs though it's got a
1.7 GHz Snapdragon 600 processor with an adreno 320 GPU 2 gigs of RAM a 5.9 in
1080P screen that's about 373 pixels per inch with Gorilla Glass 3 Wi-Fi AC and
Android 4.3 with a 4.4 KitKat update confirmed with those numbers in mind
doing this review was a little weird it's the first time a one device has
ever felt anything but blindingly fast to me it's still very fast but going
from the Nexus 5 to the one made me appreciate the subtle allround
difference that a faster phone running a newer more lightweight OS can make it
didn't bother me for the last few weeks but I definitely did notice it so we'll
start with the physical on Hands-On HTC actually sent me a case as well as a
stylus for the phone the the case well I
installed it used it for like two minutes and then I promptly put it down
behind a barn with a shotgun no but seriously I seem to have lost it so I
actually can't show it to you but I would suggest trying to find something
else anyway the stylus is a stylus I guess it's aluminum and it feels nice
but my issue is that unlike the Note 3 there's nowhere to store it inside the
phone body so unless you have amazing discipline I think you're going to be
losing and buying it over and over again and at $10 that's a little bit tough to
swallow so I decided after trying the stylus to just go be back with no stylus
for the duration of my review cuz I feel like that's how most people are going to
be using it earlier this year when I first started using it I found even the
regular one to be a bit too big for me I was coming from an iPhone 4 and a bit
slippery with its however beautiful it may be smooth anodized aluminum backing
now fast forward however many months it's been and that's all changed I'm
used to the one but moving up to the one Max is that same learning curve all over
again you've got to be extremely careful especially at first to avoid dropping it
fortunately I didn't I mean for someone like me with small hands you have got to
use both of them to handle this baby day
today if you know what I mean but uh well you know what they say practice
makes perfect and over the last few weeks I've gotten a lot better at
handling a big the front of the phone is dominated
by the huge 5.9 in screen and the boom
sound speakers man I missed those speakers when I was using the xeria Z1
and the Nexus 5 it is so nice to
actually be able to hear things again and have them playing at me as opposed
to coming out of the bottom of the phone into my palm I mean using the one for so
long I had actually started taking them for granted but now that I've been on
the other side I have a new appreciation for them the last thing on the front of
the phone is the dedicated buttons rather than onscreen buttons now I feel
like these are a bit of a mixed bag I at first felt very strongly that onscreen
buttons were a negative because they took up some of your screen real estate
but particularly on a phone like this having onscreen buttons is a non-issue
to me because the screen is so big actually many modern phones are like
that whereas having hard buttons goes and makes the phone itself a little bit
bigger which is uh something that doesn't really feel necessary in this
case so it comes down to the individual whether you prefer on screen or not on
screen I'm kind of in the middle on the right we find my single biggest gripe
with this phone the volume and lock buttons are so close together and so
similar feeling that even after a couple of weeks it's pretty much a 50/50 shot
for me to hit what I'm aiming for uh a top lock button like on the one um I
understand why they didn't do that it would have been very difficult to to hit
onehanded but um so that's maybe not the solution but I think a different feel to
these buttons on the side could have helped a lot here it's still not a deal
breaker and overall I actually really like the phone it's just that a couple
weeks in it does continue to bother me and I wish they'd found another way to
implement that moving on to the bottom of the phone we find a single micro USB
charging port I feel like wireless charging is a very conspicuous absentee
here especially with newer phones like the Nexus 5 having that as a headline
feature in fact that's one of the biggest things I miss about the Nexus 5
wireless charging is is a truly Next Generation type experience shift
compared to plugging in your phone all the time so there you go guys it's not
here but hopefully the upcoming one two or whatever they're going to call it
will on the top we find an IR emitter
yay universal remote and a headphone jack then on the back we find the Ultra
pixel camera which just like the one has strong image stabilization and is easy
to get good Stills with even in low light but has a little bit of difficulty
with autofocus NVIDIA mode um so I it
tends to kind of look for focus a lot but maybe we'll see a software update
for that I mean you see how much the Nexus 5 camera improved just with a
software update so maybe there's still hope for it on the back we also find a
fingerprint scanner that I had on for about an hour before I gave up I think a
big part of the issue for me was that um to get a solid scan you can only really
do it if you can reach it properly and consistently pull your finger across it
in a repeatable manner and that required me to hold the phone with two hands now
I don't mind operating the phone two-handed but being able to unlock it
one-handed to quickly look at things is a must for me let's move back to the
front of the phone and take some time to really talk about the screen the viewing
angles are solid I can't see the touchscreen interface even on uniform
backgrounds which is a personal pet peeve of mine and while it lacks some of
the sharpness of the 4.7 in 1080P screen
on the one unless you're reading very small text from very close up all day I
doubt you would ever even notice that I think the only complaint that I really
have about it is the slight warm or
yellow cast of the colors compared to the one especially which has a more cool
or blue look although even that stopped bothering me after about the first day
it is still obvious in a side-by-side comparison though now onto the size
there are definite challenges associated
with handling a 6-in but I think we can all agree that
having such a big clear screen is great for certain things um content
consumption is an example lately I've been mostly using my NVIDIA shield for
watching videos in bed or around the house but the One Max due to its massive
screen and great speakers has actually taken over that Duty I also find myself
zooming in less on photos that I'm viewing on the phone um when I hand it
to people to take a picture or a video for me they often comment that they can
see really clearly it's easy to use and and these things are great I
mean but initially I didn't necessarily
feel like my appreciation for those things outweighed the inconvenience of
the largess because of my of my small hands and in fact initially my review
notes about the phone's ludicrous size included only um stories like my wife's
cousin laughing at me when I was talking on it just because it's so big and I had
some negative stuff about little places where sense 5.5 didn't make use of the
additional screen size for General productivity like for example in the app
tray um and things were going to come out a bit negative um although in HTC's
defense while the app tray displays exactly as many icons in the grid as the
one and even the one mini um most stuff
is is adapted reasonably well like the launcher supports a full additional row
and column of icons and stuff like that so so that was a very minor complaint
but anyway that the direction I was headed then about 3 days into my
evaluation of the phone something happened I was standing in an office
texting someone and a middle-aged lady behind a desk nearby said to me wow what
phone is that I showed it to her and she
proceeded to play around with it and tell me a story about how her kids made
her get an iPhone and she hates it because she can't see anything on it or
type anything on it cuz it's just too small for her to press the buttons and I
realized she's right typing even though
it does require two hands for me to grip the phone and use it at the same time is
an absolute Dream On The One Max without thinking about it I had forgotten to
install swift key because even with my small hands and HTC's unexceptional
stock keyboard I was faster with less Reliance on auto correct and I'm a
reasonably good touchscreen typist so I think that's my new summary about the
size while I can use this phone and there are things I do like about it that
tradeoff of screen size to phone size wasn't necessarily designed for people
like me who want information density and compactness it was made for people who
might legitimately need a big screen for ease of use where large display elements
will be perfect and I can I can think of a lot of people like that software wise
I've used sents for months so there weren't really any surprises here but
I'll summarize some of the things I do and don't like about it swiping down
from the top with one or two fingers for your notifications or for your quick
toggles is good I like HTC's quick toggles implementation it doesn't have
3,000 things in it like Samsungs but it doesn't just lock you into half a dozen
basic things you will not use anything else like stock Android um however I do
still use power toggles just because I
particularly with a large phone like this have trouble getting two fingers up
there one-handed when if I just want to turn on my flashlight and I'm kind of
scrambling it's nice to be able to just scroll down with one and activate the
flashlight with one hand just like that um HTC's phone migration wizard is
wireless and easy to use something I wouldn't have even mentioned and would
take for granted if I hadn't tried Sony's terrible ones so recently um I
also love senses multitasking compared to other implementations like the stock
Google one that only shows a few recently opened applications and require
scrolling um blink feed is something that people either use or don't use I
don't use it but I can recognize it as an efficient way to look at all your
social media feeds and stuff like that it's just not for me um zo are another
thing that I don't really use because to me they're kind of like Vines um without
even a button to pause recording they're just little Tim limited video clips for
those of you who don't know what a zo is and the One Max can record regular
videos so I'd like to just have the option to keep it short just a few
seconds or keep it rolling um highlight reel another software feature one that I
actually do use from time to time lets you put together Quick videos and it
does automatic cuts and filters and stuff like that set to music and that
works with zo or regular videos so zo feel a little bit unnecessary and and
like you're limiting yourself a little bit now uh one other thing and I've
already been been informed that this isn't a big deal and lots of phones do
it but whatever this was my first time noticing it is that even if your phone
battery is dead the one and the one Max for that matter will turn on for a long
enough enough to trigger your alarm in the morning this is great if you're like
me and occasionally forget to plug in your phone before going to sleep when
it's really really low this feature actually saved my butt one day during
this review and I would have otherwise slept in so that's something that I did want to mention overall I like the
software maybe it's partly because my first Android experience is with sense
5.5 so it's very familiar to me but
there was one thing that I really missed from the Moto X and the Nexus 5 okay
good Google you've won me over on the whole voice thing Google Now integration
with 4.3 in the one is just not as good
or as intuitive as those other phones and even though at the time I didn't
feel like I was using it much even just trying to use maps for navigation on the
one I really really missed it so the summary is I guess I'll write
my obligatory the voice quality on the One Max is excellent um I guess like the
speakers it's a side effect of having space inside the device and the fact
that the microphone can actually be quite close to your mouth um so I felt
like I should mention that but other than that the conclusion of this video
is quite simple if you liked the one but you felt like it needed to have a bigger
battery and screen then this is pretty much your dream phone um okay no it has
some other differences um upgradeable storage is one of them I like the
implementation of the removable back there is a very slight Gap but it
doesn't detract from the overall fit and finish to me that's a trade-off I'm
willing to make moving on to the submarine conclusion oh wait sorry hold
on voice quality on the One Max I guess it is it is a phone is excellent I guess
like the speakers um being better
because you know it's just like bigger and easier to build good sound devices
in a bigger space I guess it's a side effect of the phone just being larger
but it was definitely a strong point for the phone um okay there sorry now now
conclusion time so other than that the conclusion for this video is quite
simple if you liked the one but you felt like it needed to have a big battery and
screen then this is pretty much your dream phone okay no it has some other
differences as well I mean the upgradeable storage is one big one and I
actually like the implementation of the removable back there is a slight Gap
here but I don't feel like it detracts from the overall fit and finish that
much um they've added a very very small lip like on the One Mini to I guess help
prevent screen scratching if you put it face down but it really is very small
and I still wouldn't put it face down on things either way it's a welcome
addition um both the haptic feed back and the vibrate ringtone feel less high
pitched and obnoxious to me so yeah there are some definite improvements and
with that in mind I would say the One Max is a better phone than the one but
to me it doesn't come down to those little changes it comes down to whether
you feel like you can handle all 5.9 in
of its strong
sculpted anyway guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
it leave a comment letting me know if you think faets like the One Max are
great or if you think that they're stupid and you know let the debate rage
on in the YouTube comments and as always guys don't forget to subscribe to lus
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