HTC U11 64GB

HTC U11 ​phone: Full, in-depth review

The Android flagship phone market is a crowded place but HTC's U11 is one of the best thanks to great design and very good handling. It was only relatively recently that we saw HTC launch its flagship HTC U Ultra and (lesser) HTC U Play flagship phones. Both were incredibly pretty but the Ultra was oversized, overpriced and under-featured while the U Play was an expensive (albeit attractive) mid-range phone. Now here’s the U11 which immediately addresses some of the issues seen on its siblings. It still looks fantastic but is it enough to become the all-round smartphone champion? Let’s find out…

HTC U11 : A stunning all-rounder review

It wasn’t easy to sum up the U11. It has its fair share of niggles, but plenty of redeeming features too. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but the bundled in-ears are decent enough and active noise cancellation is a nice little extra. The camera’s raw speed might not be a strong point, but you can’t fault image quality. Battery life is great, too, even if small details like wireless charging are missing. It does pretty much everything you’d expect from a flagship phone, although the Galaxy S8 does everything just that little bit better, and for just £50 more. The software is what will make all the difference. Edge Sense might sound like a niche gimmick right now, but we thought the same thing about Apple's pressure-sensitive Force Touch screens. If developers support it, and HTC gets the customisable app ready for everyone to download, it could be really useful. The accessibility potential for people that struggle with standard smartphones is huge, too. It's the same deal with the U11's abundance of AI. Google Assistant and Alexa in the same phone is a major deal, even if it wasn't ready at launch. Amazon's helper is here now, and it's the best implementation we've seen so far in a phone. The U11 was an excellent phone at launch, if not quite the best. What it could turn out to be in a few months, though? The potential is really exciting. Buy the HTC U11 SIM free here from Amazon, or on contract here (This review used two HTC U11 handsets: a pre-release, dual-sim Taiwanese variant and a single-SIM UK variant running final release firmware. It accurately represented the experience customers got at launch when the phone went on sale.)