One good reason why HTC is back in the running again Chris Griffith reviews HTC's new flagship, the HTC One, and says it's one of the most beautifully designed and styled phones around. The new HTC One smartphone handset. HTC finally has an Android smartphone capable of taking the fight to Samsung's Galaxy S4 and other recently announced handsets. That's our assessment after spending time using the HTC One smartphone; the new fourth-generation, LTE-capable One not to be confused in name with last year's HTC One X. We've written repeatedly that HTC, back in 2010, was well placed to be the dominant Android phone producer when it released the HTC Desire. That great phone came out months ahead of the first Samsung Galaxy S and was the darling of early Android phone adopters. Samsung's Galaxy range, however, overpowered HTC, which kicked own goals by becoming preoccupied with marketing lacklustre, mid-range handsets such as the ChaCha and Salsa, and by releasing a premium phone with poor battery life, the One X. The new HTC One (4G LTE) has a decent 2300-milliampere-hour battery that easily gets through the day with average use. By our calculations, you can play 6.8 hours of video on a single charge. It's a pity that HTC persists with non-removable batteries and having no microSD card slot so that users can augment internal storage. It's where Samsung continues to have an edge. But on other levels, the One is a great phone that should see HTC regain market share. According to IDC, last year HTC held a 4.6 per cent share of the global smartphone market, which was almost half of its 8.8 per cent share in 2011 and small compared to Samsung's 30.3 per cent share. In terms of design, the HTC One is one of the most beautiful phones we've seen. Its smooth aluminium back is reminiscent of an Apple MacBook Pro chassis and there's no gaps between it and the matt plastic around the edges. It's beautiful kit. That beauty extends to its 4.7-inch LCD-capacitive touch screen. At 469 pixels per inch resolution, it's well ahead of the iPhone 5's 326 ppi retina display, as are other new Android offerings. Video and images look sharp, colourful and crisp - as is sound. Audio quality and volume is decent, even without headphones, with two speakers on the front, at the top and bottom. The One has an infra-red control for controlling TV sets. Oddly, it's positioned inside the power button. It also has a 1.7 gigahertz Snapdragon quad-core processor. However, it's the software that sets the One apart, and that starts with version 5 of HTC Sense, which is grafted on to Google Android Jelly Bean version 4.1.2. I've written repeatedly about my dislike for the current lacklustre bunch of standard widgets used to populate Android phone home screens. They really pull down the professionalism of the Android interface. HTC seems to agree, because the default home screen has been replaced with a feature called BlinkFeed, which presents a customable news feed in a similar style to the popular app FlipBoard. BlinkFeed looks stylish and HTC says it has worked with content providers to ensure photos are cropped to deliver a great aesthetic experience. There are, however, issues with BlinkFeed. First, if you don't like it, you can't remove it. You can only designate another home screen as the default home screen. Second, there are insufficient feeds available in Australia. In fact, just 14 so far. You can't get newspaper news and you can't add your own RSS sources. Still, HTC could be at the start of something big with what amounts to a news hub in Android. If they want to woo the business community, maybe they could also devise a messages hub - which shows a feed of recent calls, messages and mail on a single replacement home screen. It's what the app Pure Messenger achieves, but having it glean information from native feeds would be really useful. Any hubs HTC offers should be optional. Hopefully HTC will allow this in a future update to Sense. The concept of smartphone photography has been redefined by HTC's new feature Zoe, from the Greek zoetrope. In Zoe mode the camera shoots 20 photos at six frames per second and, simultaneously, 3.6 seconds of video that are housed together in special albums. It's nice seeing your photos come to life as you peruse them and the burst of pics allows for handy editing. For example, if strangers walk by as you shoot a group of friends, you can edit them out using frames taken before they appeared. Zoe also automatically compiles videos of an event from the stills and clips into an impressive "motion gallery of memories." The real disappointment is camera resolution - just four megapixels. HTC says the camera sensors have been engineered with much larger pixels that deliver better images in low light. The reality is there was noise in low-light photos. Thanks to the inbuilt infra-red, the HTC One also acts as a TV remote. An Australian electronic program guide is built in, and you can set phone alerts for when your favourite programs come on. Searching for programs does not work properly, however - something HTC needs to address. In all, the HTC One is a great phone with wonderful features that make it fun to use. It should do well in the market but it faces competition not only from the Galaxy S4 but also Sony's new Xperia Z and LG's belatedly arriving Optimus G, both newly announced rivals. While there's no official word from HTC locally, it's tipped that the HTC One will be available in Australia mid to late next month. There's also no official recommended price, but Harvey Norman previously had advertised preorders for $746 and MobiCity's current price is $769, so expect mid to high $700s. PRICE: Mid to high $700s