HTC 10 Review

Introduction

We all love us an underdog. But the story of HTC doesn't quite qualify it for the role. At the height of its power, the Android pioneer was responsible for one out of four smartphones sold in the United States, and not by accident. But like so many other of the giants of old—think Nokia, BlackBerry—the company's fortunes took a turn for the worse. Rock bottom was last year in August, when the once high-flying brand's stock was trading below cash reserves, meaning it was essentially worthless in the eyes of investors

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Better than most.

One thing we used to appreciate HTC devices for were the display panels the company used. They were bright, mostly color correct and without the gaudy colors typical of AMOLEDs, and never went for stupid-high resolutions, trading efficiency for just a tiny bit more clarity. Up to a point, this remains the case with the HTC 10.

Things have changed, though. Perhaps most importantly, after sticking to 5-inch displays for three consecutive generations, HTC has now moved up to a 5.2-inch Super LCD 5 screen that packs 1440 x 2560 pixels. That's a density of 565 ppi, or more than sufficient to ensure everything you—or even a fighter jet pilot—end up looking at will be extremely sharp. As for the 'Super' part, it simply denotes that there's no air gap between the front glass and the display itself, helping prop the image closer to your finger.

Speaking of the image, it's a good one overall, but not perfect. Due to a disbalance between the primary Red, Green, and Blue (or RGB) colors, with the latter two towering above the former, there's a leaning towards a colder color temperature. In layman's terms, this means that the screen is bluer than it should be. As for overall color fidelity and gamma response, we're mostly pleased, even in the context of comparing the phone with other flagships.

UPDATE: HTC has sent us a new 10 unit, whose maximum brightness we measured at 430 nits. According to the manufacturer, this is the true luminance the panel is capable of, and there's been something wrong with our initial unit. We're willing to believe this is in fact the HTC 10's true max brightness level.

Finally, it should be noted that the HTC 10's software allows you to tweak display metrics through two distinct screen modes: Vivid and sRGB (on which we've based our analysis above). The former is your typical, overly saturated, AMOLED-like mode, though both modes offer the option to manually adjust color balance—which we did in order to compensate for the bluishness.