 In the past year we've seen a lot of phones with gimmicks of varying success. There's the iPhone 6S and its pressure-sensitive screen, Samsung's Galaxy Edge phones with their curved screens and VR headsets, and then LG's transformer-like G5. But this phone doesn't have any gimmicks, it doesn't have any special unique features, it doesn't even really have a groundbreaking design. It's just a smartphone. It's a good smartphone, but it's just a phone. It's HTC's new X. The X looks exactly like you might expect an HTC phone to look. It's got lots of aluminum with these large chamfered sides and rounded corners. It feels really solid, it's really well made, it's just not really an inspiring design. It's kind of just an evolution of what HTC's been doing since 2013's 1M7. I don't think that's really a bad thing, but it's definitely not going to turn any heads. Obviously, the X has a display. It's a 5.2-inch screen, it's Super LCD version 5 now, Quad HD resolution, it's really sharp and bright and vibrant, it's probably not quite as saturated as a Samsung Galaxy phone. Below the screen, you of course have a fingerprint scanner because it's 2016, and of course it has a fingerprint scanner, and then it's got two capacitive buttons beside that. The one thing that you won't find on this HTC are two front-facing speakers. This one has a bass speaker in the bottom and a treble speaker in the top, and they're each powered by different amps. They get pretty loud and they sound really good, but they're not really that much different than any other smartphone. HTC's flagship phones have struggled with their cameras for years. For the X, HTC said it's fixed most of those problems. It's got a 12-megapixel camera with an f1.8 aperture lens, optical image stabilization, laser autofocus, dual LED flash. It's a much better camera than any other HTC phone before it, but it's not really the best on the market. It's slow to launch, it can be slow to capture, and the image quality isn't as good as Samsung's are in low light. The other thing that HTC missed on is with the launching from the lock screen. It has a double swipe gesture to launch the camera, which is a bit slow and kind of clumsy. It took me a lot of practice to get this right. HTC hasn't forgotten about the X's front camera either. It's five megapixels and has optical image stabilization, which is a first for a smartphone. That means that your images in low light or at the bar are going to be sharper and your videos for Snapchat are going to look a lot better with this camera than with other selfie cameras. As you might expect, the X has all the performance stuff that you'd want in a high-end phone. It's got a Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, you can expand the storage with a microSD card slot. As a result, the phone is really fast. Apps open really quickly, the touch response is great. Compared it to a S7 and a G5, and frankly, I didn't really notice it that much faster than those, but it's safe to say the performance here is not really an issue. Also not a concern here is battery life. It's got a 3000 mAh battery that was able to get through a pretty heavy day of use for me. So that's a lot of reading on my commute, looking at Twitter, email, social networking, taking pictures, shooting video, all kinds of stuff like that you might want to do with your phone. The X was able to last through. Is it going to last two days like HTC claims? Certainly not for me, probably not for you unless you're a really light user, but fortunately it charges really quickly through the USB-C port at the bottom. Now my favorite part about the HTC X might be the software. HTC worked with Google to remove duplicative apps, so it only has HTC's email app, it's got Google's calendar, Google's photos app, as opposed to having multiple apps that do the same thing. The other thing that HTC did was it scaled way back on its customization of the interface. The interface here looks a lot like a Google Nexus phone, really isn't too much different from that. Now I've been using an unlocked model, which means that it doesn't have any of the carrier garbage on here. If you do buy the phone from a carrier, a lot of this software magic is probably going to be lost. So that's the HTC X. It's a well-performing, well-made, reliable smartphone that lasts all day. It's got a good, if not great camera, and it's got clean software that's pleasant to use and easy to look at. If that's all you're looking for in a smartphone, it works really well. But here's the problem for HTC. The iPhone 6S is a great phone. The Samsung Galaxy S7 is a great phone. The Nexus 6P is, guess what, a great phone. Even LG's G5 with all its oddball accessories still does all of the smartphone things just as well as the X. All of those phones also offer more than HTC here, whether that's a lower price or accessories to expand your smartphone experience or just a whole new way to interact with your phone. The X is just a smartphone, and frankly, that might not be enough. Thanks for watching. For more on the HTC X, be sure to check out the full review on theverge.com. You've got much more info about it as well as sample photos you can check out. And while you're waiting for that, check out these related videos over here.