[One (M7) General] Tetsumi06:
This is actually going to be very hard to write. I'll open with a fairly bold statement but PLEASE STAY TUNED!

Can I sum this phone up in a single word? Afraid not. What I can say is that it may just have been the worst purchase I have made in the last seven years.

I have (well, had) pretty simple requirements from a phone. I wanted it to be the defacto best phone on the market at the time that I bought it, knowing I would be using it for at least the next 12 months. I wanted it to have more bells and whistles than anything anyone else had ever experienced so that I could lord it over all the other sheep. I wanted it to both LOOK and FEEL like the £500+ I knew I was holding in my hand. I also wanted it to still be doing everything I asked of it a year later.

So, why do I have problems with this phone?

1) Soon as you take it out of its box and hold it in your hand you know you're in trouble. It sits there beautifully, its unassuming weight assuring you that this is a REAL phone. It takes no prisoners and it KNOWS you will want to pick it up time after time. It's so self assured in its build quality.

2) You turn it on for the first time (and it's not like this is the first time you've had a new phone!) and a few seconds later you drop then damned thing! It just went 'BOOMSOUND' during bootup and nothing you've had before has ever prepared you for that!

3) Eventually your hand stops shaking (and the phone stops booting) and you're looking at a display that it seems unlikely you'll ever grow tired of. It's now time to play with it. It's incredibly smooth, clear and fast.

Now for the REAL problems.

You can ask my wife here and she will back me up 100%: When I get a new phone I play with it for a few hours a day for the first 3, maybe 4 days. By then I have worked out what it's capable of, set the various home screens up to suite my needs, tested a few games, tunes and videos then wrapped it in a decent case and parked it in my pocket, somewhere it lives for the next 11.75 months.

The HTC One screams out to be held and used though. A quick google search? I reach for the phone. Twitter? Phone again. Forums? Phone. Poker? Phone. Lovely view of the snowcapped mountains? Phone.

I've had the damned thing for almost 3 weeks now! It should be stuffed into a jacket pocket somewhere: all its predecessors were. It refuses to go though. Typing up this post is hard work - I'm using a laptop as the phone sits there demanding attention. Over the past 7 years I have probably posted 5, maybe 6 of those update things; rarely have anything to say and I deem the 'like this post' button as joining some kind of teenage clan I would rather stay away from.

Enter Blinkfeed. Pre release this thing was almost a deal-breaker. I want my phone to look like a phone, I want it to have my most important stuff on the home screen. I did NOT want to have some company foisting their vision of the future on me. I quickly shifted it to a side screen whilst customizing my phone assuming I would never look at it again. It's now just another reason to reach for the One and fiddle with it. It's also responsible for a 10,000% increase in my Facebook interactivity.

I used to watch downloaded movies on my laptop. Not anymore - I stream them to the phone - it manages to display them smoother than the laptop can.

Also used to listen to music on my laptop. Yet again it's been supplanted.

It is so bad that for the first time in well over 20 years I actually reached for the phone whilst I was out at the pub with my mates last Friday. I ALWAYS mute my phone and park it in a jacket pocket when I'm out for the night, only remembering where it is when I need a taxi at the end of the night. I've never been tempted before.

This message was sent from a rather forlorn laptop using a keyboard (whilst the xda-app equipped HTC One screams to be used instead)