 Nobody's made Android phones longer than HTC, and from the G1 to the One, it's always done good work, even when it hasn't been hugely successful. But for all HTC has done in the Android universe, its new phone might be its most important yet. This is the new HTC One. Technically, it's the One, parentheses, M8, and I keep calling it the One 2, but everyone's going to know it as the One. It's sort of appropriate that it has the same name, too, because it's not exactly a huge shift. HTC got a lot of things right last year, and it's left those things mostly alone while trying to fix what went wrong before. The phone is still incredibly well made and attractive, though it's a little more subtle this year. It's a little more rounded and made of a slightly softer metal. It doesn't feel or look quite as impressive, but it's much more comfortable. Its back now wraps around the sides, giving it a sort of unibody feel like there's a metal out there that just naturally curves this way. The phone's a bit taller than last year's model, mostly to accommodate a slightly larger five-inch screen, but it doesn't feel any bigger than the old One. That screen is gorgeous, by the way, a 1080p display with perfect color representation and fantastic viewing angles. It may not be the most pixel-dense display on the market, but it's every bit as good as I need it to be. The One comes in a beautiful silver and a hideous gold, plus a brushed metal gray that's nice looking but not quite as eye-catching as the silver. HTC moved the headphone jack to the bottom, added an SD card slot, stretched the IR blaster across the whole top of the phone, and has on-screen buttons instead of sticking them below the screen. One thing that hasn't changed? The two big boom sound speakers on the front, which still sound fantastic. Even better than last year's, actually, a little louder and fuller. But this phone is more the same than different. It's a little heavy, extremely well-made, and still probably the best-looking Android phone around. Last year's One had two big problems. Chief among them, its mediocre battery life. This year, it's really not a problem. I could get a full 30 hours out of the phone, even with extremely heavy use. There's also a new extreme power-saving mode, which basically shuts off everything but the phone, texting, and manual email refresh, and can pretty much by itself get me through an entire night with only about 10% of the battery. There's a big 2600 mAh battery inside, but the One's new Snapdragon 801 processor certainly helps too. And along with 2 gigs of RAM, it makes the phone incredibly fast. I don't think I've ever had such a smooth experience with an Android phone, other than maybe the Nexus 5. But that's not to say I didn't have issues with the phone. HTC's Sense software still changes every single pixel of Android, and many of them were for the worse, especially some of the icons and menus. But HTC's skin has become far more coherent than last year's, with a flat design that often does look really nice. Everything about this phone feels like HTC is searching for something it can make commercials about. There's BlinkFeed, the built-in news reader that now leaves one screen to the left of your home screen. It's a really handy way to kill a minute or two waiting to cross the street, and I use it a lot, but it's really not meaningfully better than, say, Flipboard. BlinkFeed now integrates with Foursquare for restaurant recommendations, and Fitbit for fitness information that you can sync from either the phone's internal sensors or any Fitbit device you own. Both are cool add-ons, but again, neither is better than the apps themselves. The other thing is a bunch of gestures HTC enabled to make it easier to do things quickly on your phone. Swipe right on the screen when it's off, and you'll launch straight into BlinkFeed. Swipe left and you go home. Down kicks you straight to voice dialing, and double tapping just turns the screen on. You can even pick up the phone in landscape mode and hit the volume button, and you're launched straight into the camera. After a day, I stopped using the power button entirely, which is still irritatingly placed on the hard-to-reach top of the phone. Now here's the second thing HTC got wrong last time, the camera. It's much-advertised 4-megapixel ultra-pixel camera basically saw in the dark, had some cool features, and took bad pictures. And this year, that's still kind of the case. The software is better than ever, with a super simplified interface that also gives you lots of control over white balance, filters, ISO, and more. It's uncluttered and useful, which is hard to do. One of the coolest new features is the ability to focus a photo after the fact, like with a Lytro. It's using a second camera on the back of your phone to capture depth as you're capturing a photo. The effect isn't quite as pronounced as with a Lytro, but it's really cool to tap a blurry spot in a photo and watch it spring into focus. HTC also still has Zoes, the sort of automatic highlight reel shots that are nifty but lost my attention pretty fast. The software is great, and there's lots of features, but the camera still isn't very good. It sees in the dark, yes, taking photos of things where my iPhone sees only black. But those photos, and photos in just about any other situation, are still too soft and too muddy. Even the 5-megapixel front-facing camera does better in some spots. It's certainly an improvement over last year's camera, but all the cool features in the world can't hide that its photos just don't compare to the Galaxy S4, or the iPhone 5S, or even really the Nexus 5. Depending on your carrier, the HTC One costs $199 or $249 with a two-year contract. If you're phone shopping in the next few months, that camera is my only reservation in telling you to buy the new HTC One. It's gorgeous, comfortable, well-made, and competitive in every spec and feature. HTC's Sense software isn't great, but it's far less problematic than it's ever been, and the parts you don't like can be obviated pretty quickly. It's big, but so are all flagship phones these days, and my iPhone is starting to look mighty small. Really, it's all about priorities. HTC is so close and so good at so many things, if it can just make a great camera, it might run away with the crown for best Android phone. But we can't have it all, at least not yet. HTC's on to something this year with the new One, but I'm already waiting anxiously for next year's model.