Amir’s HTC DNA Review
I thought I was ahead of the game when I bought my Motorola Droidx two years ago. Well, it started off really buggy. Google fixed that with a couple of updates. Alas the last one made it dead slow. Everything took a couple of seconds to start and of course the 3G network did not help either. So the itch got stronger and stronger to get an upgrade.
First target was the Samsung Galaxy III. Got one as an upgrade for my son. Pretty nice phone and thin/light. But the colors were way off and OLED screen burn an issue. Plus it felt kind of cheap and plasticy.
Next was the Razr HD Maxx from Motorola. But while I was waiting on that, I learned about the Samsung Note 2. I liked that because my main application for my “phone” is not to make phone calls but to keep up with email, WBF
, and looking things up, etc. I was constantly zooming and sliding the screen to see web page and such. So I thought Note 2 would solve that. Size had me concerned some.
Then I heard about the rumors of the HTC DNA which was released recently in Japan. The specs made me really salivate. What really caught my eye though was that it was hardly bigger than a normal phone and smaller than Note 2.
So sight unseen but after reading some reviews, I picked one up the morning of Nov. 21. This is my quick review of it augmenting the many that are online. Price was a reasonable $199 with contract instead of the outrageous $299 for Razor HD Maxx. And the same for Note 2.
Let’s start at the top. This phone is the same width as modern Android smartphones. But is about half inch taller. For that, you get a remarkable 1080 display. I am talking about 1920x1080 pixels – same as your 40 or 50 inch display shrunk to 5 inches! I am talking about 440 pixels per inch. I am talking 30% higher than the mighty iPhone 5’s “retina” display. I am talking about bragging rights for the whole neighborhood!!!
Now this would be for not if this was not a quality display with good contrast. But it is. You will read huge praise for this display in every review. Let me tell you this: it is even better than that! Text is so well formed on this device that is seems to be like ink floating on top of glass. Likewise graphics and colors are natural but with superb quality. I have read that the color tint is a bit on the blue side relative to iPhone 5. If it is that, it is not too obvious.
Here is a startling test for me. I was testing an update of my company’s web site: madronadigital.com. To make sure it looks good everywhere I usually test it on my phone. So I load up the page and nearly fall off my chair when the entire web site shows up *in portrait mode*! Like most modern web site, ours is fixed width at 900+ pixels. Of course, that fits in 1080 pixels with some left over for good measure! The text while crisp was hard to read. I rotated the phone and now it was fully legible! Load up the site and you can see the difference I am talking about relative to scrolling you have to do on any other phone (Samsung, etc. are 720p).
The screen alone would have made the phone but there is one more star: the aesthetics. I tell you, this is the first phone that blindfolded you would think Apple produced it had Verizon not forced the masculine black and red colors onto it. It is stunning in every way. It is thin yet expensive looking. The curves are perfect as are accent colors. The back has some kind of matt finish but strangely, shows fingerprints. It provides adequate friction to keep the phone from being slippery but would have been nice to be more sticky.
Under the hood this is a quad core CPU running at 1.5 Ghz. It runs Jellybean (4.1) release of Android which is supposed to have performance enhancements. Just about everything you do is instantaneous on this phone. Occasionally though, it will start to stutter a bit. It is not remotely like my last phone and is only noticeable because it is so fast otherwise.
4G LTE sings as it should. I measured about 13 mbit/sec at our house with half signal strength. On Wifi using Comsast land line, this dropped to 6 mbit/sec! This is a shared network at home though. Still, it was funny that everything ran better using the 4G LTE than land line. One video I was trying to watch kept stuttering with Comcast but ran smooth as silk using LTE.
Jellybean adds some nice features such as battery reporting down to each app/feature. In typical web browsing/email workload, I get more than 24 hours of use before it shuts down. This is somewhat better than my Droidx. Start playing games or use the video camera though and power consumption picks up. This phone has 2X more pixels than Samsung GIII and filling them constantly with a full frame of game or video takes more CPU. The battery is 2000 miliamps so on the lighter. For my use which includes very little game play, it is perfectly fine. But otherwise, it may be problematic.
Also problematic for many will be lack of micro-SD expansion card and the fact that it only comes in 16 Gigabyte version! I heard the Japanese version did have micro-SD so Verizon pushed this to not have one. Can’t figure out why they would do that other than driving bandwidth usage by pushing cloud storage. It is not an issue for me since I use a separate music player when on the road. As it is, the device has 11 Gigabytes free.
Another problem is a cover over its micro-USB jack. It is there to make it water resistance apparently. Reviews say it is hard to open and close. I did not find it so. What I found problematic was that it is very hard to stuff the plug in there. It goes in a bit and then gets stuck. You have to really jam it in there. I am hoping over time this will loosen. For now, to solve both problems, I have ordered a Qi wireless charger which the HTC supports natively. I ordered the Nokia version. Will write a review when it arrives.
One of my concerns was whether this device fits in the pocket. I am happy to report that it easily does. Even in my tight jeans. It is thinner than my Droid so on that front you feel it less. But it does feel a bit longer. OK, no jokes please. The sharp edges do make it a bit hard to hold when making long phone calls. I learned to loosen my grip some and that helped.
The speaker it the thing is loud. But if the volume is too high, the back resonates. You can't hear it audibly but you do feel it in your hand and it is kind of annoying. Lowering the volume some eliminates it yet the level still remains loud enough.
Voice quality on the receiving end is excellent. I don't know yet how it sounds at the other end.
Compatibility wise, I have only found two related to the display. First one is the calculator. The digits don’t fit the boxes and get clipped! OK, how hard is it to notice something like this and fix it? No big deal but it is the kind of fit and finish problems that gives Apple an advantage. The second problem was in a Tide Prediction program I downloaded. In landscape mode it put up a keyboard that was totally screwed up. But worked in portrait mode.
Talking about the keyboard, boy this was an unexpected but pleasant surprise. This thing is just large enough to have a keyboard where in portrait mode you can type and never hit the wrong key! This makes a huge difference in usability. On the down side, its config is a bit less optimal than my Motorola. For example, it doesn’t put up the @ sign on the first page which one uses frequently when filling out online forms and logging in. There are third-party keyboards so that can be easily fixed.
I am not big on cameraphones but did play with it a bit. I liked its very close focusing which was down to 2-3 inches. Often I use my camera phone to take a picture of some sticker on a product or model number and having close focusing is nice.
I never do any conferencing on my phone either but did play with the front camera. First use was to have it unlock the phone using my face. It was then that I noticed how distorted my face was. Reviews praise this for giving you a wider view. Well, the other side of the coin is that this wide angle lens distorts things and gives a non-flattering image of you. I think I have a second reason to not use it for video conferencing. Anyway, the screen lock thing as I expected was useless. It worked well when I used it where I configured it. Then I moved to our kitchen and with different lighting, it could no longer recognize my face. So I turned it off.
Even if you are not interested in this phone, the features here pave the way for many others come next year. I expect just about every high-end phone to have a 1080p display next year and quad core CPUs standard. I would give it a 9 out of 10 for my needs. No other phone would reach the same score in my application. HTC had really fallen behind and with this phone have managed to reach the top. It is highly recommended if you can live within its bounds of storage.
I thought I was ahead of the game when I bought my Motorola Droidx two years ago. Well, it started off really buggy. Google fixed that with a couple of updates. Alas the last one made it dead slow. Everything took a couple of seconds to start and of course the 3G network did not help either. So the itch got stronger and stronger to get an upgrade.
First target was the Samsung Galaxy III. Got one as an upgrade for my son. Pretty nice phone and thin/light. But the colors were way off and OLED screen burn an issue. Plus it felt kind of cheap and plasticy.
Next was the Razr HD Maxx from Motorola. But while I was waiting on that, I learned about the Samsung Note 2. I liked that because my main application for my “phone” is not to make phone calls but to keep up with email, WBF
, and looking things up, etc. I was constantly zooming and sliding the screen to see web page and such. So I thought Note 2 would solve that. Size had me concerned some.Then I heard about the rumors of the HTC DNA which was released recently in Japan. The specs made me really salivate. What really caught my eye though was that it was hardly bigger than a normal phone and smaller than Note 2.
So sight unseen but after reading some reviews, I picked one up the morning of Nov. 21. This is my quick review of it augmenting the many that are online. Price was a reasonable $199 with contract instead of the outrageous $299 for Razor HD Maxx. And the same for Note 2.
Let’s start at the top. This phone is the same width as modern Android smartphones. But is about half inch taller. For that, you get a remarkable 1080 display. I am talking about 1920x1080 pixels – same as your 40 or 50 inch display shrunk to 5 inches! I am talking about 440 pixels per inch. I am talking 30% higher than the mighty iPhone 5’s “retina” display. I am talking about bragging rights for the whole neighborhood!!!
Now this would be for not if this was not a quality display with good contrast. But it is. You will read huge praise for this display in every review. Let me tell you this: it is even better than that! Text is so well formed on this device that is seems to be like ink floating on top of glass. Likewise graphics and colors are natural but with superb quality. I have read that the color tint is a bit on the blue side relative to iPhone 5. If it is that, it is not too obvious.
Here is a startling test for me. I was testing an update of my company’s web site: madronadigital.com. To make sure it looks good everywhere I usually test it on my phone. So I load up the page and nearly fall off my chair when the entire web site shows up *in portrait mode*! Like most modern web site, ours is fixed width at 900+ pixels. Of course, that fits in 1080 pixels with some left over for good measure! The text while crisp was hard to read. I rotated the phone and now it was fully legible! Load up the site and you can see the difference I am talking about relative to scrolling you have to do on any other phone (Samsung, etc. are 720p).
The screen alone would have made the phone but there is one more star: the aesthetics. I tell you, this is the first phone that blindfolded you would think Apple produced it had Verizon not forced the masculine black and red colors onto it. It is stunning in every way. It is thin yet expensive looking. The curves are perfect as are accent colors. The back has some kind of matt finish but strangely, shows fingerprints. It provides adequate friction to keep the phone from being slippery but would have been nice to be more sticky.
Under the hood this is a quad core CPU running at 1.5 Ghz. It runs Jellybean (4.1) release of Android which is supposed to have performance enhancements. Just about everything you do is instantaneous on this phone. Occasionally though, it will start to stutter a bit. It is not remotely like my last phone and is only noticeable because it is so fast otherwise.
4G LTE sings as it should. I measured about 13 mbit/sec at our house with half signal strength. On Wifi using Comsast land line, this dropped to 6 mbit/sec! This is a shared network at home though. Still, it was funny that everything ran better using the 4G LTE than land line. One video I was trying to watch kept stuttering with Comcast but ran smooth as silk using LTE.
Jellybean adds some nice features such as battery reporting down to each app/feature. In typical web browsing/email workload, I get more than 24 hours of use before it shuts down. This is somewhat better than my Droidx. Start playing games or use the video camera though and power consumption picks up. This phone has 2X more pixels than Samsung GIII and filling them constantly with a full frame of game or video takes more CPU. The battery is 2000 miliamps so on the lighter. For my use which includes very little game play, it is perfectly fine. But otherwise, it may be problematic.
Also problematic for many will be lack of micro-SD expansion card and the fact that it only comes in 16 Gigabyte version! I heard the Japanese version did have micro-SD so Verizon pushed this to not have one. Can’t figure out why they would do that other than driving bandwidth usage by pushing cloud storage. It is not an issue for me since I use a separate music player when on the road. As it is, the device has 11 Gigabytes free.
Another problem is a cover over its micro-USB jack. It is there to make it water resistance apparently. Reviews say it is hard to open and close. I did not find it so. What I found problematic was that it is very hard to stuff the plug in there. It goes in a bit and then gets stuck. You have to really jam it in there. I am hoping over time this will loosen. For now, to solve both problems, I have ordered a Qi wireless charger which the HTC supports natively. I ordered the Nokia version. Will write a review when it arrives.
One of my concerns was whether this device fits in the pocket. I am happy to report that it easily does. Even in my tight jeans. It is thinner than my Droid so on that front you feel it less. But it does feel a bit longer. OK, no jokes please
. The sharp edges do make it a bit hard to hold when making long phone calls. I learned to loosen my grip some and that helped.The speaker it the thing is loud. But if the volume is too high, the back resonates. You can't hear it audibly but you do feel it in your hand and it is kind of annoying. Lowering the volume some eliminates it yet the level still remains loud enough.
Voice quality on the receiving end is excellent. I don't know yet how it sounds at the other end.
Compatibility wise, I have only found two related to the display. First one is the calculator. The digits don’t fit the boxes and get clipped! OK, how hard is it to notice something like this and fix it? No big deal but it is the kind of fit and finish problems that gives Apple an advantage. The second problem was in a Tide Prediction program I downloaded. In landscape mode it put up a keyboard that was totally screwed up. But worked in portrait mode.
Talking about the keyboard, boy this was an unexpected but pleasant surprise. This thing is just large enough to have a keyboard where in portrait mode you can type and never hit the wrong key! This makes a huge difference in usability. On the down side, its config is a bit less optimal than my Motorola. For example, it doesn’t put up the @ sign on the first page which one uses frequently when filling out online forms and logging in. There are third-party keyboards so that can be easily fixed.
I am not big on cameraphones but did play with it a bit. I liked its very close focusing which was down to 2-3 inches. Often I use my camera phone to take a picture of some sticker on a product or model number and having close focusing is nice.
I never do any conferencing on my phone either but did play with the front camera. First use was to have it unlock the phone using my face. It was then that I noticed how distorted my face was. Reviews praise this for giving you a wider view. Well, the other side of the coin is that this wide angle lens distorts things and gives a non-flattering image of you. I think I have a second reason to not use it for video conferencing
. Anyway, the screen lock thing as I expected was useless. It worked well when I used it where I configured it. Then I moved to our kitchen and with different lighting, it could no longer recognize my face. So I turned it off.Even if you are not interested in this phone, the features here pave the way for many others come next year. I expect just about every high-end phone to have a 1080p display next year and quad core CPUs standard. I would give it a 9 out of 10 for my needs. No other phone would reach the same score in my application. HTC had really fallen behind and with this phone have managed to reach the top. It is highly recommended if you can live within its bounds of storage.
