 Last February, HTC announced the One, a smartphone critically praised for its design, build quality, and performance. But unfortunately for HTC, it didn't turn into a huge sales success, the company still has declining market share and profits. Now the company is ready to release another new smartphone, also called the One. We're here in San Francisco at the company's Want & Co. Design Studio to talk to the industrial design team behind the new HTC One, and to find out what HTC is bringing to the table in 2014. The new One is a refinement of last year's successful design, it's softer and more coherent looking with more metal and less plastic. It's a better looking phone than last year's model, and it's rounder edges make it more comfortable to hold in your hand. HTC wasn't content to write out a familiar design like Samsung did, it built upon last year's well received phone and made it better. And really it had to, HTC doesn't have the same luxuries as Samsung. The screen has been bumped up to 5 inches, though it's still 1080p resolution, and the entire phone is a little bit taller as a result. The display looks really great, it has wide viewing angles, great color reproduction, and no visible pixels. The phone itself is upgraded on the inside too, with a Snapdragon 801 processor, bigger battery, 2GB of RAM, and 16 or 32GB of storage. Both the new One and the model before it were designed right here in San Francisco by Want & Co., the firm that HTC purchased in 2008 and turned into its own internal design studio. Before that, Want & Co. was involved in a variety of projects, everything from digital cameras and smartphones to furniture and even snowboard boots. I run the user experience and industrial design teams at HTC, which is basically, it's comprised of essentially three locations. There's the Taiwan team, obviously that's where our headquarters is, so we have a fairly substantial design and user experience team there. We have the team here in San Francisco, primarily industrial design, although there are a few user experience people. And then my head of user experience is based out of Seattle, so Drew Bamford, who's the vice president of user experience, is based out of Seattle. I think one thing you don't realize as a consultant is how much happens on the back end and how many leaps and hurdles and travails you have to kind of get through inside a corporation. So I think that's, it's very rewarding when something comes out. If I think about the HTC One last year, having that focus, having moved inside of HTC, having that focus really let us deliver, you know, just a really remarkable phone. This year's model debuted HTC's Ultra Pixel camera to varied successes, and this year the company is once again betting big on the One's camera. The new One has a secondary sensor on the back that accompanies the 4 megapixel camera. It acts a lot like a lightro camera, providing depth information to do things like refocus images after the fact or give pictures a 3D-like effect. We essentially use a stereoscopic optic system, and that allows us to basically define or assign range to every pixel. What that allows us to do is then take that information and we can actually reinterpret that for various applications. When you were developing this camera and coming up with these concepts and ideas, did you see a need in the marketplace that, you know, people wanted to be able to refocus their photo after the shot? Or was it just kind of like, this can do this and it's really cool and you know what, we're going to throw it in there and it's going to be fun? Focusing or focus accuracy isn't an issue. We have extremely fast autofocus. You know, that need's probably been met. One of the sort of big shortcomings that we felt in the optics in smartphone cameras is because of the extremely small TTL, the absolute necessity of having a thin optic stack, is that you can't get those sort of gorgeous, shallow depth of field shots. So you can actually now use that information to create things like super compelling portraits or actually replicate the sort of effect you'd get from extremely, essentially unattainable glass in a smartphone. HTC tells us that it's also completely revamped since for the new one. It runs on top of Android 4.4.2 and features various color coding for different types of apps. The entire OS feels cleaner and flatter and things like the camera app interface have been simplified and cleaned up a lot. Blink feed has been expanded with data from Foursquare and the one now has built in Fitbit integration to track your steps and movement throughout the day. The one can also be woken up with a double tap on its screen and there's gestures right from the lock screen to launch apps or go directly to your home screen. HTC is also debuting a basic flip cover case for the one called Dot View. It has a grid of holes that see through to the one's display, letting you see time, weather or notifications with just a glance. It's whimsical and fun and injects a little bit of personality into the device. But more importantly, it also gives HTC yet another marketing point. Like Zoe in Blink Feed and Boom Sound in Ultra Pixel, the company wants people thinking about and talking about its phones. You mentioned that you learned some things from last year's model and applied it to this year. Maybe could you go more specific into that? Initially we had some supply issues. Now the supply chain is up and running and we've solved a lot of those issues. So that's one of the big things, just operationally we're able to execute on it. Number two is, if you think about just going from 70 to 90%, there's another antenna breakthrough that's happened there where we can actually have even more metal on the product. We don't have to have that plastic sidewall anymore. We can actually bring the metal all the way up to the front surface of the phone. It's actually quite challenging. A lot of people don't know this, but there's more than 10 super sensitive antennas inside these phones. So somehow you look at this phone and you're like, where are those antennas actually broadcasting? Where are they actually coming through? As much as there is to like with the new one's hardware and design, and really it is nice, hardware wasn't a problem for the company last year. HTC is far enough behind Samsung and Apple at this point that shooting for the stars probably isn't its best strategy. The company could carve out a comfortable third place position, much like how Microsoft is trying to do with its Windows phone platform. The third place is dangerous. It frequently means that customers aren't necessarily thinking about your product when they walk into a store. HTC can't afford to wait for customers to be pleasantly surprised when they pick up the one. That strategy didn't work last year and it likely won't work this year. Competing with Samsung's marketing machine is by no means easy, but it's what HTC has to do. The road ahead is an uphill battle.