The HTC 10 is an Improvement in Every Way

Despite numerous leaks that seemed to paint a pretty clear picture of what the HTC 10 was bringing to the table, the handheld managed to make it to its official reveal with plenty of secrets intact. The biggest secret? It’s an improvement in just about every way possible.

Zach Epstein over at BGR managed to get his hands on the new smartphone and couldn’t stop gushing about how much better it was than HTC’s earlier efforts. According to the company, the “HTC 10 is about perfection,” and with that philosophy they’ve eschewed traditional innovation in favor of perfecting what was already there. Did they succeed? We won’t know for sure until the actual reviews begin rolling out, but reports so far have been favorable.

One of the big things HTC did was cut down on bloatware by getting rid of any of their software that Google had already done better. Android takes precedence over the Sense interface and you’ll only get Google’s version of the photo gallery, calendar, calculator, and so on and so forth. HTC only kept their own apps in instances where they actually brought something different to the table, like their camera app, which offers a host of features and options for taking pictures.

The HTC 10 offers a 5-megapixel front camera (the first-ever front-facing camera to offer optical image stabilization) and a 12-megapixel “UltraPixel” camera that camera review site DxOMark claims rivals the Galaxy S7 as the best smartphone camera in the world.

Then there’s the battery, which can last two whole days, according to HTC. Now, we’ve heard plenty of battery life claims in the past that haven’t panned out, but a whopping 3,000 mAh battery combined with software optimized for lower power usage could finally deliver. And when it does run dry, the Quick Charge 3.o feature will get the battery back up to 50-percent in less than 30 minutes.

“BoomSound Hi-Fi Edition” means that the phone has a separate tweeter and woofer, both with their dedicated amplifiers. The headphone amp provides high-fidelity sound, too. The touchscreen is more responsive, the fingerprint scanner works faster; the HTC 10 is just an overall improvement.

The phone is packing a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage (with microSDXC support up to 2TB). The display is a 5.2-inch Quad HD LCD affair.

The phone is now available for preorder in the U.S. for $699.99 off-contract. If you’re in Canada, the phone is only available through Bell, though contract and no-term pricing hasn’t been released yet. You can purchase an unlocked version through HTC’s store for $999 CAD.