Category:
Model:
Manufacturer's Website:
Short Description:
Newest htc flagship fully loaded with options.
Physical Description:
Dementions: 15.4 x 7.6 x 0.8 cm,
Weight: 168 G,
Materials: aluminum, gorilla glass,
Available colours: black, silver, blue, red,
Inputs: usb-c bottom face, duel sim and sd card top face, four surround sound microphones,,
Physical keys: Volume rocker, power buttons right face,
Cameras: 12 mpx reer face, flash reer face, 16 ultra mpx front face,
finger print sensors: front face,
Processor: Qualcom snapdragon E835 2.4 ghz octicore,
Ram: 6 gb,
storage: 128 gb expandable up to 2 TB,
What's in the box: htc u11, earbuds, earbud tips, Data cable, Wallwort, 3.5 mm to usb-c adapter, sim removal tool, screen cleaning cloth, warrantee, quickstart, reer face protector cover,
Extra features: Squeeze sides to perform quick actions, htc boomsound, both amazon alexa and google assistant,
Accessibility Features:
Stock accessibility features. See comments for full review.
Experience:
It's going to be nice once I break it in.
Comments
U11 with hit and miss accessibility
This is an exciting day for me. I took my htc u11 out of the box last week. No podcast, sorry. I recorded it, but things fell through on me as you'll see in a moment. Now I'm up and running with this phone which I bought outright and will now make work or bust. Realistically, it's a super nice phone, and I'm happier with it every day as I install more apps and iron out more kinks. Consider this review a work in progress. I'll update it as I try more of the htc apps.
If you buy this duel sim international version that I bought, it probably won't talk for you out of the box. I took this phone out of it's celephane and hit the power button, and it came up pre-configured with no set up required and no way to turn on talkback. To add insult to injoury, the language had been defaulted to japanese. I had sighted assistance and youtube, but even after talkback was turned on there was no japanese tts installed and the phone didn't speak. After getting the basics with sighted assistance, I restored the phone to factory defaults and the setup was the same. So, something is really broken in the firmware of this phone. Hopefully I don't have to reset often.
I like the feel of the phone. It's very plane feeling. I was also able to find a low profile case to protect the glass. Boomsound unfortunately is a shaddow of it's former self. They've taken one of the speakers out of the bazel, and created some sudo stereo using the phone's receiver speaker. Not the worst sound I've tested in my quest for a nice sounding phone, but not up to the htc 1m9 or htc 10 by a long shot. I've also scanned some bar codes with the reer camera, and that works greesed lightning. The only hardware feature I haven't found yet is the second sim card slot. Caution! When inserting a sim card and sd card... There are sound apertures for microphones and ambient sound output all over the device. It's actually possible to poke a microphone or something using the sim removal tool if you aren't careful. On my phone, the sim drawer is on the top edge on the left side with the screen facing you, and the insertion point for the eject button is imediately to the right of the sim drawer towards the middle of the phone.
After setup, I imediately discovered that the keyboard called touchpal doesn't work with talkback. Talkback did not read the letters as I explored with my finger. I could guess and be right but the first wrong really messed things up. I had a bt keyboard and used it exclusively until I could get the gboard installed. Touchpal with a bluetooth keyboard actually worked farely well. Talkback announced the keyboard shortcuts that belong to touchpal, and there's a fairly inobtrusive autocorrect feature. I want the choice of using the onscreen keyboard though, and touchpal doesn't hack it.
HTC sense launcher is a step backward. Organizing apps with sense is still in the dark ages. Why is it so hard to ship a phone with an up-to-date launcher? The app drawer in sense is screwey as well. It won't scroll automatically, and it has things sorted in an order that I haven't figured out yet. I'm a bit disgruntled with sense, but I want to try the three finger media gestures with talkback and haven't gotten around to it yet. I'll update the review when I get around to it. I'm going to end up installing google now regardless.
The phone app scores with me. This has always been one of my favourite features of htc phones. What? A phone with an instantly available dial pad? Unbelieveable, but htc has done it. Plus, I can switch to qwerty with a tap if I want, or swipe to my favourites and history. I really just love the htc phone app. It's not only perfectly accessible, it's a phone.
I didn't think I'd care about the squeeze feature. It struck me as not only gimmicky and fluffy, but also a potential pain in the neck depending on how sensitive the sensor is. Fortunately, the sensor is very nice, and the setup and configuration are fully accessible. I've even used it a couple of times. It's just a matter of finding the most useful settings. Squeeze not only allows for launching an app or system feature with a long squeeze, but also lets you do a couple of common actions with each supported app or feature using double and long squeezes. My case thwarts squeeze a little bit, and I'm actually thinking it might be nice to go to something that lets me use the feature.
The camera app seems a bit fiddly, but talkback reads the basic controls, and I'm pretty confident that I could switch cameras, take a picture, or start recording a video. Third party apps can still do a better job of helping me to take pictures and videos that are actually worth seeing, but other phones such as the motorola G2nd edition don't do well in this area at all.
I'll throw up an update or two as I find things out. So far, my conclusion is that I really like the phone, but I'd prefer a higher level of commitment to accessibility in a high end flagship product like this. If you get through the first half hour, it's good, but not for the beginner or the faint of heart. Time for htc to step up and make accessibility as much a part of the experience as everything else about their product.