[One (M7) General] welchertc:
Just got my silver One this last Saturday, and in less than a week, in completely impressed and have changed my negative views of HTC. Sorry if this gets long winded, but here is my review.

My first android phone was the Captivate, which was an awesome little phone. I chose it over the Nexus 1 at the time because I could walk into an ATT store and buy it. The Captivate got me hooked on Samsung and their AMOLED screens, and I continued on to buy the Infuse, the Galaxy Nexus, and the original Note. I loved Samsung phones, and their ease of rooting and ROMing.

From the start of my time with Android, Sense has always kept me away from HTC phones. No, it wasn't much of a complaint, as ROMing can easily fix that. However, I usually adopt phones early, and try to use the stock ROM for a while, and Sense made that completely unappealing.

Over the last year or so with my Note, my Samsung favoritism started failing me. The Note's screen had terrible gradient issues, making the deep blacks that I've enjoyed on amoled screens all but appealing. Samsung has also started to become less developer friendly, and Touchwiz is more bloated than ever with features that are useless to me. Also, they went away from using textured plastic which felt great on phones like the GNex, and stated using that horrendous glossy plastic. I hated it so much that I took sandpaper to my glossy white Note to make it a matte finish.

Meanwhile, in the last year, HTC piqued my interest with the One X. I thought the phone was beautifully crafted. Matte finish, good screen, everything hardware wise was appealing to me. Sense 4 also started to do away with the glossy bubblegum look of Sense that I hated so much. Alas, I knew that by the time I could upgrade, the One X would be replaced by something superior, and the first HTC that I had liked in a long time was not an option for me.

Then, BAM. The One.

At first, I doubted it. Unibody aluminum construction sounded mighty fine, but made repairs pretty much impossible. No removable battery, yet again, and I had come to love using two batteries and an external charger with my Note. Smaller screen then the S4 and especially my Note, and it's LCD. No expandable memory. Blinkfeed. All in all, my first impressions from internet reviews were lackluster.

But then I saw it in person, and was taken completely by surprise. Held side by side with the S4, the decision was a no-brainer.

The aluminum body was indeed phenomenal to hold. This is the most solid phone I have ever owned, and the bead blasted aluminum screams quality to the touch. I recalled that I haven't had to repair a phone in years (knock on wood), so my worries about the repair ability quickly washed away.

I turn on the screen, and wow. The whites are white. The colors are accurate. No, the blacks aren't as black, but the other colors took precedence this time around, and black gradients were completely smooth from black to white.

My concern for battery life was quelled by further reading of reviews which indicated it should be better than my Note by a decent amount. So far, so good, it's been great for me. I don't have solid numbers, but it's lasted me all day since I've bought it.

As for storage, I realized that I've never really filled the 16 GB phones I've had in the past. Plus, the One has 32 GB for the same price as a 16 GB S4 on T-Mobile. There's also the free Dropbox storage that comes with it for two years.

Sense 5 was really interesting to me. It's much more visually pleasing than Touchwiz now, and I really like they route they've gone towards minimalistic design. Blinkfeed is sort of cool, but ultimately gimmicky for me. Regardless, Sense 5 is a huge improvement over past iterations in my book, and seems very lightweight. A switch to my good old Apex removed Blinkfeed and allowed my icon customization.

The biggest welcome surprise for me are the speakers. I can't believe how good they are. Yes, the occasional pop and crackle occurs, but, POWER. In the past I usually used headphones to watch stuff on my phone, but at home that's no longer necessary. Phone calls also sound exceptional, and I no longer have to fiddle around to position the speaker over my ear canal to get sufficient sound.

Performance of this phone is beastly, which I expected from this gen of phones. But compared to the S4, this phone is butter. In my limited time playing with the S4 in store, I noticed some jumpiness and lagging here and there. All lag is pretty much noon existent on the one. Color me very impressed. I didn't know a phone could be this smooth.

Overall, the One is far and away the best phone, IMO, on the market today. Almost everything about the phone impresses me, and the minor issues are fairly irrelevant. I can only hope that HTC can survive their recent financial issues, and can continue to improve upon this incredible foundation of a phone.