 For me, like probably many of you, HTC made my first Android phone. I mean, check this out. This is me with the 1M7, so shiny and exciting. And then I, like probably many of you, was disappointed by HTC, by their complacency, their pricing, their customer service, their build quality. Basically, in certain reason not to care anymore here. The 1M9 era marked a particularly rough patch in the Taiwanese company's history, with investors valuing it at less than the cash it had in the bank. I mean, what? I mean, what? But more recently, there's been good news too. The HTC Vive is the VR headset to get if that tall guy I hang around with is to be believed. He's not dying! But HTC's core business is mobile phones. And that thing is not a phone. So are they ready to give up and just make computer peripherals from now on? Apparently not. Meet the HTC 10. To celebrate the launch of their Nitro Plus Radeon RX 480, Sapphire is giving some of them away. Learn more and enter the giveaway at the link in the video description. The 10, like every other flagship smartphone right now, packs a Snapdragon 820 CPU paired with an Adreno 530 GPU. So performance should be pretty much right in there with everyone else, assuming that the overheating issues that the 1M9 demonstrated in our water-cooled phones video haven't made a reappearance. And it looks like we're in okay shape here. The iPhone 6S is the golden standard and doesn't throttle in my geekbench repeatedly test at all, but I consider anything around a 10 to 15% reduction in performance during continuous heavy use to be very good. The 10 falls well short of that mark, a surprise given its ample thickness, but it isn't something that I noticed day to day and at least it doesn't cut in half like its predecessor. Also packed into the 10's aluminum frame is 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 32 or in some regions apparently 64GB of storage, and a non-removable 3000mAh battery that saw me through every day during my time with the device. Features that have become shockingly standard fare in recent times. I mean it's not a knock against the 10, it's a good thing, it just doesn't help it stand apart. Let's get then to what does. The screen is a subtly curved Corning Gorilla Glass topped 5.2 inch Super LCD 5 affair with a pixel count of 2560x1440, making it a solid choice for use in a VR viewer like Google Cardboard, if you're into that sort of thing. Nothing about its viewing angles, anti-reflectiveness or colors popped out and in fact, while I didn't notice this in daily use, next to the Galaxy S7 and the iPhone 6S, its display has a noticeable pink cast, something that neither switching from Vivid to sRGB color mode nor adjusting color temperature helped with. So okay then that was a lie, the screen wasn't a differentiating point. Below the screen is a capacitive home button with a quick and accurate integrated fingerprint sensor flanked by two hardware capacitive buttons for last application and back, that I wish could be swapped like on the OnePlus 3 but that I otherwise can't complain about. The chin bar size on the 10 was actually just perfect for me to type totally naturally. Above the screen is an optically stabilized 5 megapixel selfie camera that does a little more noise reduction post-processing than I would personally like but otherwise generated very good results. Apple really has some catching up to do with their next generation selfie cam and then finally an exceptional feature. Gone is BoomSound dual front-facing speakers but here is actually a replacement that I can't believe no one else thought of. The earpiece speaker doubles as a loudspeaker that combined with the surprisingly directional bottom firing speaker that handles more of the mid and low frequencies delivers an exceptionally balanced listening experience. Nice work HTC. Also on the bottom of the 10 is some dents from me dropping it, oops, the main microphone and a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C shaped port. More on that in a moment but this is another pretty sweet feature. With the fast file transfer feature enabled I was able to saturate the 100 and 150 megabyte write and read speeds respectively of the internal storage moving videos to and from a computer. This is great for offloading photos and videos or loading media onto your device before a trip. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like you can set it to work this way by default for reasons that are beyond me but that I think may have to do with the USB Type-C shaped port not having been implemented in accordance with the USB Type-C standard. Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 variable voltage fast charging prevents QC 3.0 chargers from operating at the same time that data transfer is taking place which makes OnePlus' Dash Charge, a 4 amp 5 volt fast charging method look good for reasons that go beyond keeping the phone cooler during charging. On the left of the device is a micro SD slot for expandable storage, awesome, and on the right is the SIM tray, the volume rocker, and a lock button that thanks to the textured top is easy to differentiate both in pocket and without. The headphone jack is on top in the middle and if it sounds ridiculous the first time you plug it in you're like what is all this bass in my music? Turn off the Dolby enhancement in the settings menu, you're welcome. And then at the rear is a noise cancelling microphone, dual tone flash, laser autofocus, and 12 megapixel rear camera whose lower megapixel count hurts under ideal well-lit conditions but whose conservative denoising post-processing, optical image stabilization, and larger light scooping pixels deliver some of the best low light performance I've seen. These images were taken under identical lighting conditions with the S7, the 6s, and the 10. Check out how well you can read that text with the 10. And I'd say for the most part camera control is a really strong point too. Autofocus is laser quick, all the usual shooting modes like 4k video, raw stills, or slow-mo are there, plus it's got this neat hyperlapse mode that folks are going to have a lot of fun with, and the pro sliders all show up on screen at the same time making it really fast to adjust when manually shooting. I just wish it was a little faster to open personally. I mean the app itself launches as quickly as anyone else, but HTC's implementation of gesture control isn't the best I've seen. The two swipes down to open the camera is a little flaky and only works when the screen is off, and this is a criticism of everyone, not just HTC, but why can't I reconfigure whichever gestures I want to do whatever stuff I want? Anyway, I still like the Sense skin including BlinkFeed, and it's pretty close to stock Android now, so at this point all that's left is for me to drop the phone and deliver my conclusion. It feels like every other reviewer in the world is declaring it to be a hit, a clinic on how to make a smartphone or some other variation of the second coming, but I didn't come twice, or even once for that matter, though it should be noted that that is not because the HTC 10 is a bad phone. It actually, remarkably, doesn't seem to do anything wrong. It's just because it also doesn't push the innovation envelope in any way that's meaningful to me personally. The better speaker experience is going to win over some buyers for sure, but I'm more partial to the waterproofness of the S7 and the pressure sensitive screen and lightning fast performance, including Wave 2 AC wireless, I wish everyone else would implement that, of the iPhone 6S. Maybe the problem though is that phones are just kind of mature now. The last remaining huge gap in smartphone functionality that Apple enjoyed, the camera, has mostly been closed by the Koreans, the Chinese, and now the Taiwanese, to the point where I feel like a phone isn't so much standout good as standout bad with anything else being good. But maybe that in itself is a good thing. Maybe the fact that a solid phone that performs well and feels good in the hand in spite of its thicker design doesn't excite me anymore is just good for buyers because that's what the HTC 10 is. I personally still prefer the S7, but you might not, and it's good to have choice. And you know what other choice is good for consumers? The choice of where to put your dbrand skin. Do you want to put it on a laptop? Do you want to put it on a phone? Do you want to put it on a game console or a game controller? Well, that's up to you, and you've got more choices too. If you head over to dbrand.com, we've got that linked in the video description, you can use their fantastic configurator to configure your device, whether it's the touchpad of a laptop versus the bottom or the top of it, or whether it's the back of a phone versus the sides of a phone. You can configure pretty much any surface on the device with any color and any finish you want, and you can preview it in real time so you'll know before you get it that it's going to a fit great on your device because all dbrand skins are precision cut, and b represent your personal style, whether your personal style is tasteful or clown-like. I won't judge. So again, that's the link to dbrand.com in the video description. Thanks for watching guys, if this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit the like button, or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured, so the HTC 10, at Amazon in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel super fun.