The HTC One Max is a large and heavy phone that feels well-optimized and has no notable performance issues. The device's size comparison with other large phones, such as the Samsung Note 3, Galaxy Mega 6.3, and Z Ultra, shows that it is one of the larger devices on the market.

In terms of ergonomics, the HTC One Max is similar to the Samsung Note 3 in that it has a lot of bezel around the display, which can make it uncomfortable to use. However, the HTC One Max has slightly rounded corners, which makes it feel more comfortable to hold and use than some other devices with flat or angular shapes.

Despite its large size, the HTC One Max is still a relatively lightweight device, making it manageable for most users. In fact, compared to some of the larger phones on the market, such as the Samsung Note 3, the HTC One Max feels quite small and comfortable in the hand.

On the other hand, the HTC One Max is significantly larger than devices like the iPhone, which has a smaller 4-inch display. While this may be acceptable for some users, others may find that it's too big to handle comfortably.

The build quality of the HTC One Max is excellent, with a beautiful display and high-quality materials used throughout the device. The audio performance is also impressive, thanks to the presence of stereo speakers that provide clear and balanced sound.

One area where the HTC One Max falls short is in its camera performance. While it has a good low-light camera for most situations, it's not the best camera available on the market. Specifically, it has a relatively low resolution and lacks optical image stabilization, which can make it difficult to take high-quality photos in certain lighting conditions.

However, when it comes to taking selfies, the HTC One Max is one of the better devices available. The front-facing camera has 2.1 megapixels and supports HDR recording, making it a good option for capturing high-quality video and photos.

In terms of software, the HTC One Max runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean on top of Sense 5, which provides a number of useful features and enhancements to the standard Android experience. However, one area where the device falls short is in its placement of the Android controls, particularly the home button and back button. The home button is placed in an uncomfortable position that requires users to tuck in their thumbs to reach it, while the back button is too far away on the right hand or too close on the left hand.

Finally, one area where the HTC One Max could be improved is in its battery life. While it's definitely a big selling point for this device, some users may find that it lasts for less than 24 hours of moderate use, depending on their specific usage patterns and habits.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys Mike here de detour board with a look at the HTC One Maxx which is kind of the big brother to the HTC One this is a 5.9 inch display 1080p versus a 4.7 inch display at 1080p these phones are very similar they have very similar specs they're just kind of a blown-up version here and of course we have that fingerprint scanner which is one of the first Android phones in recent times to get a fingerprint scanner this works a little differently than the one on the iPhone which kind of images your finger this actually just scans the capacitive characteristics of your finger so it's a little different you actually have to kind of swipe it in order for it to work now in terms of specs same specs as the HTC One we saw this Snapdragon 600 1.7 gigahertz processor which is kind of old news now and then we have two gigs of ram we have a 32 gigs of standard storage we have a micro sd card that can support up to 64 gigs and then we also have HTC boomsound which is one of the big selling points for melius with the HTC One are these very loud stereo speakers excellent sound out of this thing of course the beats branding has gone because HTC has parted ways with Beats Audio alright so this is a verizon review unit so it's already been open for me so I don't have a real unboxing here but I'll just show you what it would look like if you got this new so the phone comes packaged for you it's kind of hard to get out once you get it back in there there we go so as you can see it's a really large phone 7.7 ounces it's kind of a thick phone as well but to me feels really nice in the hand it's heavy and kind of cumbersome to use by very large hands and its really nice this material is really nice the aluminum and the heavy construction just feels really solid now we're going to take a closer look at that in just a minute so inside we have our micro USB charging cable as well as the wall adapter HTC branding and of course we have some literature we have our sim card and then we have some HTC stickers but we do not have a set of headphones at least with a Verizon unit all right so let's go and take a look at the HTC One Maxx so the interesting thing here is that we have very similar construction it's actually very similar to the HTC One mini kind of a shrunken down version of the HTC One but if you look at the ACC one versus the Maxx you see that the construction is a little different so you can see that surrounding the phone on the max is this polycarbonate so it's a plastic construction more plastic construction but along the side here you have these sham furred bezels so you have this more edge to edge metal design as opposed to we do with the HTC One Maxx which I actually don't object to it actually feels really nice in the hand really comfortable but you still get that nice cool solid touch of aluminum and you can see we still have those brakes here along the back and I'll buy the camera as well you can see our LED flash same here again these are the ultra pixel cameras one with optical stabilization one without it and of course we have our capacitive fingerprint scanner and then you can see our brakes up here as well you can also see our microphones same location same location for the headphone jack now there's another difference here if you look at the top of the HTC one the IR blaster for controlling your AV equipment is actually the sleep/wake button on the HTC one that is not the case on the max it's just a dedicated IR blaster because they've relocated the buttons for ergonomics obviously because the phone is so much bigger they wanted to reposition some of the buttons so if you look on the right side here as you see in addition to your volume rocker you now have your sleep-wake mug just below that now I do find that when I intend to adjust the line my often hits the sleep/wake button which can get a little annoying because they are so close to each other and it's always not always easy to discern which button is which so I do have a little complaint there now in terms of the bomb again very similar microphone along with the microUSB charger but otherwise they look very similar one thing you will notice here is that the Max has these connections for an accessory on the HTC cells now along the right side you'll find this little switch here for removing the back panel so we have a spring-loaded switch so we push that it releases the back panel and I can kind of pry off let's go ahead and do that comes off pretty easily and if you look at the inside of the pen you can see it's a nice milled piece of aluminum so it's pretty rigid so nicely made you can see the friction fittings along the side here for connecting back to the device if you look inside here one thing you notice is that the barre is sealed in so you cannot remove the battery we also have our SIM tray as well as the micro SD tray right there and you can see our fittings here for snapping on the back panel I find the best way to put this back panel on is sort of line up the left edge here make sure it snaps into place and then work it back onto the phone and there you go kind of to push toward the center and it stamps back on now the one thing it did know this is that it still kind of has problems fitting in the upper right corner so it kind of snaps like that that's always the case I can't seem to get it to snap back into place and then along the side sometimes if you haven't fitted it properly this will stick out as if one of the clasps is pushing on the plastic so when you press the home button it snaps in and out so sometimes you have to fix that but otherwise if you snap it on right using that procedure it seems to work ok now along the front again pretty much a scale up version of the HTC One complete with our stereo boom sound speakers which are superb or even louder with the HTC One Maxx this is by far one of the best sounding mobile devices I've ever used so it's great for watching video now on the front we have one of the best front-facing cameras I've used this is a 2.1 megapixel sensor with 1080p video at 30 frames per second it also has HDR video and then we have our ambient light sensor and proximity sensor and as you can see we have a little LED indicator here for notifications all right so let's going to take a look at our user experience so this is again running Android 4.3 with HTC Sense 5.5 so it's the latest version of HTC Sense as you can see on our live stream we have our date and time as well as our weather information of course it's snowing what else is new around here and then you can bring your drop down shape to take a look at your notifications which are expandable of course you also have your settings titles so this allows you to access some quick settings such as do not disturb which is a feature that HTC Sense 5.5 adds which is very useful basically turns off your notifications temporarily we also have our fingerprint scanner which will demonstrate a bit later we have our quick access to settings and of course our brightness controls now we also have an editor in quick settings so we can change what appears under quick settings as you can see we have a big list which we can rearrange we also have these other items which are grayed out that's because you're limited to 12 at a time so I have to remove one of these to get one of these other features so for example I can go ahead and remove fingerprint scan and add GPS so I click done takes effect now if I go to the drop down shade there we go now if you see these three dots here that means it will take you directly to the control panel for additional settings so Samsung kind of does this as well they will do this you can do that the same action and Samsung by tapping and holding on one these quick settings so just tap on that takes you right to the control panel for more options now it can unlock our device and it takes us right to blank feed which is the default home screen I actually really like blinkfeed it basically aggregates all of your social networks some news stories and news feeds so for example my Twitter feed Instagram Facebook Google+ everything feeds automatically into this so when you bring it down you can see it basically refreshes it so you get a little bounce effect it refreshes your feed with the latest information it also tells you your calendar events so you can see have a calendar event at up top so it's Valentine's Day so happy Valentine's Day everybody we have you know our Facebook feeds as well now if you want to modify any of this or limit what you're viewing here just swipe to the right takes you to your list where you can change your settings so you can see I have some of my topics here which include the verge trending topics automobiles entertainment lifestyle sports technology and science and then my services and apps which includes Facebook's Twitter Google+ my calendar gallery as well as my TV app so basically this has an IR blaster so he does include your TV programming as well and then you can just select highlights which basically automatically selects it for you now you can make changes here by going to plus so this allows you to add additional services such as The Associated Press Reuters The Huffington Post and other things from entertainment food etc etc and then we have other tabs here so we can select categories we can select custom topics so we can search by topic so for example if you want to do Android you could do that as well services and apps again these are apps that can take Vantage of it such as Instagram so if you want to enable Instagram for blinkfeed just tap on it and then you'll just have to login to authorize blinkfeed to use it now if you swipe to the right you get to your classic home screen this is where you can arrange apps you know say if your app drawer which is where you can pick up more apps and as you can see they've already done a nice job of arranging them so you can actually live entirely in this sort of viewer here you don't have to use your home screen to arrange apps all your apps will be here and you can arrange them in also you can hide them if you want so if you don't want to see all these apps just go to settings up here manage apps or hide/unhide apps and you can select certain apps you want to hide so that's actually very useful actually really like this system so you don't really necessarily have to have two places to look up apps you can just use your app drawer and keep your home screen free but of course you have options now you have several options for managing your app drawer so you can do most recent you can arrange by an alphabetical or you can do custom which includes all the folding and then we have a quick access to the Google Play Store which I actually find very useful so you can always know where the Google Play Store app is just by going to your app drawer now if you tap and hold on the home screen you get to this editor this allows you to change which home screen you want to be your home screen and whether you want to turn blinkfeed on or not so you can now turn it off if you prefer so it completely turns it off disappears and now you have the classic home screen and nothing else now I can also customize your home screen so right now by default the blinkfeed screen is the home screen but if you select one of the other home screens and set that as the your home screen now when you hit home and takes you to the classic home screen so you can get away from blinkfeed that way without deleting it now this is also where we get our widgets so we can add a widget to our screen or we can select apps or shortcuts so let's go ahead and add one of our widgets just to show you how this works so let me go ahead and grab the calendar widget now we can take it up to any one of the home screens we want to drop it in go ahead and drop it there so there we go now we can hold it move it around and resize it and if we don't want it tap and hold it take it up to remove and there goes now in terms of blinkfeed if you see any story that interests you I have to do is tap on it takes you right to the app or website that it originates from and you can read it in full now I just want to talk about our Android controls again these are off screen backlit capacitive controls they're a little dimly-lit compared to the East tc1 I think that's my biggest complaint with them besides their location that would be nice if the home button was toward the center or all of these were put on the home screen or on the screen itself I tend to prefer virtual buns just because I think they're easier to operate by anyway if we press the home button takes you to the home screen back takes you back but in order to get to the recent apps you have to double tap the home button takes you to recent apps in this highly customized version of it so you can see the most recent app is in the lower right corner the oldest is in the left and you're limited to nine at any given time so if you open up another app the oldest app will be closed now this also allows us to quickly jump to any one of them and then we can also swipe them out of the way to close them now you can adjust the behavior of the home button under settings so for example if you tap and hold the home button by default it takes you to Google now but I've changed it to bring me to settings so no matter what app you're in it takes you right to settings but of course settings toggles or buttons will appear in the app now you can also swipe up on the home 1 to take you to Google now so you can see quickly launches Google now and you can do that from anywhere on that device now let's go and talk about the fingerprint scanner so I'm just going to go to our quick toggle here to get to fingerprint and now I've already programmed this for my fingerprint previously so it needs to authorize it so I'm going to swipe here that didn't work this time it had been working so let's try again and there you go now as you can see it's kind of an awkward position generally you can find it but you do kind of to swipe your finger across the camera lens sometimes to do it so it can be a little strange to use especially with such a large phone to find the right spot but here you can see I've already programmed two fingers my left index finger for unlocking and launching the camera my right index finger for just unlocking the phone I can program one more action so you can program three fingers three actions click continue you can select which finger you want to program so I'm just going to go with my middle finger here and now I'm going to go ahead and swipe my finger let's see if I can do this on camera now once it's learn my fingerprint I can assign an action to it so let's click OK so you can see we have a few things we can do we can launch the camera we can go to the home screen we can launch voice assistant or choose an app so let's go and choose an app I'm just curious about that so let's say we want to launch Instagram that's an amp use a light you should be following me there for not so good the Instagram so I'm going to swipe my middle finger and there it goes launched Instagram now the fingerprint scanner isn't 100% reliable so for example my left finger is designed or set up to launch the camera app but for whatever reason I can't see it just does not recognize it so we'll keep doing this until I get to my passcode which you do have to program when you set the fingerprint unlock but for whatever reason my right index finger seems to work all the time now in terms of apps that come with the phone we do have some Verizon apps which are in this folder here for us those of course come with a Verizon foam but we also have Amazon content which comes with HTC phones we have Google as well so all of these standard Google apps are included we have our media apps which includes some google apps and then we have a few other apps such as the TV remote app which I still have to set up basically you use this to control your a/v equipment so we learned your a/v equipment your channel settings whether or service you're using and automatically programs it gives you a little tutorial so I'm in the United States I'm going to enter in my zip code so you can see the shows that are playing right now on your local channels and you can set up your remote as well so this is where you have to program your devices in so you can select which TV you have I do have a Samsung click Next and then basically will coach you through the process and then we'll run the IR code to see if it works for you so once it's learned all your devices you're good to go and you can control your TV and directly from your phone now of course if you need to get back to your TV app just bring down your drop down shade and you have these quick toggles right in the notification panel so you can mute your audio you can turn off your equipment or close the app entirely or just jump right into the remote app under tools we'll find a few other features including our clock our customized HTC clock then we have scribble which was the Notes app now this no longer syncs to Evernote as it did with the HTC One then we have kid mode which allows you to control what content you want displayed on your device while your children are using it now we also have this car app which basically sets up the phone for easier use in the car so you can see these large oversized buttons your navigation options as well as the phone dialer so if we go to navigation here this gives you ways of searching for Pio eyes such as gas stations things in Google Maps previous destination restaurant dining by photo parking cafes bars ATMs that sort of thing so again large buns for easy use in the car but of course you can also use voice navigation as well alright so let's going to take a look at some of our settings so if we go to settings you can see we've got this little bounce effect when we scroll through and we reach the end the settings panel so pretty standard stuff Wi-Fi Bluetooth toggles mobile data data usage if you go the more you get some more settings for networking such as setting up a VPN and we do have NFC technology built in here as well so if we go to that you can see some of our settings here so you can toggle it on or off display gestures and buttons this is where you can customize the behavior of the home button so right here our home button by default it has swipe or press and hold for Google now I've changed it to swipe up for Google now and press and hold for the menu and now so you can change your font sizes brightness screen timeout notification light so if you want certain notifications to activate the LED you can select those they're all all on by default now I can also change the speed of the home button double click so if you want normal slow or very slow you all set HTC gestures and the G sensor calibration which you can all do from this panel sound as well so this is where you can control some major sound of course they have eliminated the Beats Audio profile so that equaliser isn't here but of course you can install your own now if you go the sound you'll find some other settings here such as vibration do not disturb which you can toggle on and off also from the drop down menu change your ringtones now has two settings here which you can toggle on and off which are on by default so quiet ring on pink up so it will lower the ring volume when you pick up your phone also pocket mode so it blasts the speaker louder when it's in your pocket or in the bag we also have our fingerprint scans setup tool so this is where you can go there to set that up or change it storage options so this is where you can see how much storage you're currently using we have our app manager accounts and sync backup assistant Plus which is a Verizon utility location security languaging keyboards backup and reset date/time accessibility software update and about this phone now under the power settings will find our battery life as well as our usage history so you can see what apps are using the most battery and we see our complete history and timeline I get excellent battery life with this I can easily get three days of heavy use out of this mattock so it's really impressive that's including LTE or Wi-Fi use now the one max also has a kid mode which you can activate by tapping them holding the power button and in addition to restarting airplane mode and power off you can also enable kid mode which I've not set up here but this allows you to kind of sandbox your device so they only have access to certain files and apps now in terms of this display again 5.9 inch Super LCD three so excellent IPS display with bright whites good contrast excellent off excess viewing angles very color accurate a very vibrant vivid display but not overblown like an OLED display so definitely one of the best features of this device is the display that was true of the HTC One as well now it's not quite as pixel dense as the HTC One so this has 373 PPI by contrast the iPhone as 326 while the HTC One has 469 so still really excellent text is pin-sharp even the smallest text is absolutely legible without pinching in and out so you can see text looks excellent on this device so it makes it an excellent eReader so if you want to use this for reading text it looks great now as I said we have HTC boomsound and these speakers are excellent or even better than the HTC One for perhaps the best sounding mobile device you can buy right now so let's go ahead and test this out just going to load one of my recent videos what's up guys my gear Borgen it's finally that time of the year to take a look back at 2013 to see what Apple did throughout the year and what my personal top 5 picks are from that year so before we get to the top 5 let's recap starting off with him so they're not only loud I mean they're not obnoxious loud or blowing out loud but they're really clear especially if you hold this device closer to you you really get the depth of sound with those stereo speakers so definitely a real good selling point with this phone all right so let's go and take a look at the camera app which is pretty nice so we have our filters we're pretty familiar with plenty of filters I'm not going to go through all of them we have our show to release tap to focus you can also tap and hold to lock exposure and focus tap anywhere again to release it so we can take our photo we can record video as well and then we can snap photos while recording video as you can see it adds it to the gallery and then when we're done go right to the guy wait to see what we've done so you can see we can playback or video or take a look at the photos we've shot now we can also enable Zoe mode now Zoe basically when you take a photo it records a small segment of video before and after the photo is taken so when you take a photo looks like a normal photo but if you go to the gallery you'll actually see it appear as sort of a label segment see there we go so you can a little audio and everything with that Zoe we also have our settings down here so we have our scene mode so we can select normal we can also go to our drop-down and pick other things like landscape backlit text macro that sort of thing and then we also have night mode HDR sweep panorama dual capture anti-shake so we do have sort of a software stabilization in here as well now dole capture basically allows you to record both the front-facing and rear-facing camera at the same time again this is similar to Samsung's dual shot mode if you're familiar with it so that's also there as well and you can move it around now generally speaking image quality is pretty decent so for example is outside at night using the flash and it did a pretty decent job filling the scene with light and the low-light performance of the camera made up for the rest so if I turn the flash off I still got pretty decent results in dark conditions although without optical image stabilization some of these shots turn out blurrier than others depends on when you press that shutter so you can see this is blurrier than the next scene so if I go to the next shot you can see I got a sharper shot so you do get more mixed results without optical image stabilization because the lens isn't as stable as you'd like to see it so otherwise low-light performance is definitely the highlight of this camera now just to give you an idea of the relative system performance of the one max versus other phone so we have the one max and the one both score very similarly which is to be expected because we're running the same hardware now the note 3 is running a Snapdragon 800 processor so we do get better single core score but a weaker multi-core score and then we have the iPhone which is quite a ways ahead here with more than double the single core score and a much better multi-core score as well so you can see this is sort of mid-range in terms of performance but it still gets ahead quite well I mean there's no system issues in terms of performance it's a really smooth operating phone and HTC Sense is not a heavy skin so it seems to be well optimized and I've had no performance or notable performance issues or frame dropping in terms of the user experience so really no complaints in terms of power now just to give you a size comparison with other large phones the note 3 the galaxy mega 6.3 and the Z ultra this is the Google Play edition the Z ultra is 6.4 this is 6.3 so you can see that the HTC One for a screen size is a relatively large device and that's because there's more device around the display than some of these other phones are actually this is actually kind of similar to the Z ultra which has I think a little too much bezel around it to be as usable as it could be just because there's just so much room in the way of using the displace with this large bezel which gets in the way and that's similar to the ECC 1 but HTC One does have feels a little more comfortable use it is slightly smaller in hazlet rounded corners so those are more comfortable use also feels really nice in the hand because of that convexed shape as opposed to the flat or angular shapes now the mega is still one of the better devices in terms of ergonomics for large phones this is still a really lightweight rounded and comfortable to handle X you really like this phone but I think the biggest phone I can handle is probably something like the note 3 it's about the right size I actually feel small compared to these devices now I actually used to feel big but compared to those devices this feels quite manageable now of course this is much bigger than something like the iPhone so the iPhone is quite a bit smaller that's understandable the iPhone is one of the smaller phones out there a 4-inch display so in conclusion the HTC One Maxx kind of lives up to the HTC One it's based on excellent build quality beautiful display excellent audio thanks to these stereo speakers and a pretty decent camera it's not the best camera still I think to low resolution but it's an excellent low-light camera for most situations it's still a great camera it would be nice to have had optical image stabilization like the HTC One but it's still pretty decent and the fingerprint scanner is actually pretty good it works pretty well I find it really only works on my right index finger maybe for left-handed will work better on your left index finger but for me that's really the only finger works well on now my only real complaints here remain from the HTC one and that's the non-traditional placement of the Android controls and particularly on a large phone so the home button is in the very uncomfortable position so every time I want to reach for the home button kind of have to tuck in my thumb to reach it and that's also true on the left hand so on the left hand the home button is now too far away so it'd be nice if it was toward the center or if they put the buttons back on the screen and the same with the back button it's kind of a far reach on the right hand and it's also a little too close on the left hand for such a large display that you're gripping higher up so I'd like to see them change this as well and we still have the problem with the back panel which doesn't quite fit as well as it should but otherwise excellent build quality excellent display audio and performance and of course battery life is definitely a big selling future here and it's one of the best so that's going to do for me in this video hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you again in the next one alright guys Mike here a Detroit Board testing out the front-facing camera of the HTC One Maxx again 2.1 megapixels good for 1080p video at 30 frames per second and also features HDR so it's quite a decent camera it's one of the better front-facing cameras have used on any phone I think the only weakness is audio pickup so you have to tell me how the audio sounds but I think it's not as good as something like the iPhone which has excellent audio pickup so let's go and take a look at the performance of the main camera alright so this is the main camera and of course I have my favorite subject Zoe & Chloe so they're going to be my stand ins today hey Zoe so let's see we have tap to focus so we can tap to focus while recording video doesn't seem to do it automatically hey Zoe now this isn't the best lighting condition so you can see they're a little more variable and has a harder time with white balance right now there we go let's see if it's going to focus for me yeah see do you have to tap the scene' to refocus alright so let's go outside in bright light conditions and see how it performs you youhey guys Mike here de detour board with a look at the HTC One Maxx which is kind of the big brother to the HTC One this is a 5.9 inch display 1080p versus a 4.7 inch display at 1080p these phones are very similar they have very similar specs they're just kind of a blown-up version here and of course we have that fingerprint scanner which is one of the first Android phones in recent times to get a fingerprint scanner this works a little differently than the one on the iPhone which kind of images your finger this actually just scans the capacitive characteristics of your finger so it's a little different you actually have to kind of swipe it in order for it to work now in terms of specs same specs as the HTC One we saw this Snapdragon 600 1.7 gigahertz processor which is kind of old news now and then we have two gigs of ram we have a 32 gigs of standard storage we have a micro sd card that can support up to 64 gigs and then we also have HTC boomsound which is one of the big selling points for melius with the HTC One are these very loud stereo speakers excellent sound out of this thing of course the beats branding has gone because HTC has parted ways with Beats Audio alright so this is a verizon review unit so it's already been open for me so I don't have a real unboxing here but I'll just show you what it would look like if you got this new so the phone comes packaged for you it's kind of hard to get out once you get it back in there there we go so as you can see it's a really large phone 7.7 ounces it's kind of a thick phone as well but to me feels really nice in the hand it's heavy and kind of cumbersome to use by very large hands and its really nice this material is really nice the aluminum and the heavy construction just feels really solid now we're going to take a closer look at that in just a minute so inside we have our micro USB charging cable as well as the wall adapter HTC branding and of course we have some literature we have our sim card and then we have some HTC stickers but we do not have a set of headphones at least with a Verizon unit all right so let's go and take a look at the HTC One Maxx so the interesting thing here is that we have very similar construction it's actually very similar to the HTC One mini kind of a shrunken down version of the HTC One but if you look at the ACC one versus the Maxx you see that the construction is a little different so you can see that surrounding the phone on the max is this polycarbonate so it's a plastic construction more plastic construction but along the side here you have these sham furred bezels so you have this more edge to edge metal design as opposed to we do with the HTC One Maxx which I actually don't object to it actually feels really nice in the hand really comfortable but you still get that nice cool solid touch of aluminum and you can see we still have those brakes here along the back and I'll buy the camera as well you can see our LED flash same here again these are the ultra pixel cameras one with optical stabilization one without it and of course we have our capacitive fingerprint scanner and then you can see our brakes up here as well you can also see our microphones same location same location for the headphone jack now there's another difference here if you look at the top of the HTC one the IR blaster for controlling your AV equipment is actually the sleep/wake button on the HTC one that is not the case on the max it's just a dedicated IR blaster because they've relocated the buttons for ergonomics obviously because the phone is so much bigger they wanted to reposition some of the buttons so if you look on the right side here as you see in addition to your volume rocker you now have your sleep-wake mug just below that now I do find that when I intend to adjust the line my often hits the sleep/wake button which can get a little annoying because they are so close to each other and it's always not always easy to discern which button is which so I do have a little complaint there now in terms of the bomb again very similar microphone along with the microUSB charger but otherwise they look very similar one thing you will notice here is that the Max has these connections for an accessory on the HTC cells now along the right side you'll find this little switch here for removing the back panel so we have a spring-loaded switch so we push that it releases the back panel and I can kind of pry off let's go ahead and do that comes off pretty easily and if you look at the inside of the pen you can see it's a nice milled piece of aluminum so it's pretty rigid so nicely made you can see the friction fittings along the side here for connecting back to the device if you look inside here one thing you notice is that the barre is sealed in so you cannot remove the battery we also have our SIM tray as well as the micro SD tray right there and you can see our fittings here for snapping on the back panel I find the best way to put this back panel on is sort of line up the left edge here make sure it snaps into place and then work it back onto the phone and there you go kind of to push toward the center and it stamps back on now the one thing it did know this is that it still kind of has problems fitting in the upper right corner so it kind of snaps like that that's always the case I can't seem to get it to snap back into place and then along the side sometimes if you haven't fitted it properly this will stick out as if one of the clasps is pushing on the plastic so when you press the home button it snaps in and out so sometimes you have to fix that but otherwise if you snap it on right using that procedure it seems to work ok now along the front again pretty much a scale up version of the HTC One complete with our stereo boom sound speakers which are superb or even louder with the HTC One Maxx this is by far one of the best sounding mobile devices I've ever used so it's great for watching video now on the front we have one of the best front-facing cameras I've used this is a 2.1 megapixel sensor with 1080p video at 30 frames per second it also has HDR video and then we have our ambient light sensor and proximity sensor and as you can see we have a little LED indicator here for notifications all right so let's going to take a look at our user experience so this is again running Android 4.3 with HTC Sense 5.5 so it's the latest version of HTC Sense as you can see on our live stream we have our date and time as well as our weather information of course it's snowing what else is new around here and then you can bring your drop down shape to take a look at your notifications which are expandable of course you also have your settings titles so this allows you to access some quick settings such as do not disturb which is a feature that HTC Sense 5.5 adds which is very useful basically turns off your notifications temporarily we also have our fingerprint scanner which will demonstrate a bit later we have our quick access to settings and of course our brightness controls now we also have an editor in quick settings so we can change what appears under quick settings as you can see we have a big list which we can rearrange we also have these other items which are grayed out that's because you're limited to 12 at a time so I have to remove one of these to get one of these other features so for example I can go ahead and remove fingerprint scan and add GPS so I click done takes effect now if I go to the drop down shade there we go now if you see these three dots here that means it will take you directly to the control panel for additional settings so Samsung kind of does this as well they will do this you can do that the same action and Samsung by tapping and holding on one these quick settings so just tap on that takes you right to the control panel for more options now it can unlock our device and it takes us right to blank feed which is the default home screen I actually really like blinkfeed it basically aggregates all of your social networks some news stories and news feeds so for example my Twitter feed Instagram Facebook Google+ everything feeds automatically into this so when you bring it down you can see it basically refreshes it so you get a little bounce effect it refreshes your feed with the latest information it also tells you your calendar events so you can see have a calendar event at up top so it's Valentine's Day so happy Valentine's Day everybody we have you know our Facebook feeds as well now if you want to modify any of this or limit what you're viewing here just swipe to the right takes you to your list where you can change your settings so you can see I have some of my topics here which include the verge trending topics automobiles entertainment lifestyle sports technology and science and then my services and apps which includes Facebook's Twitter Google+ my calendar gallery as well as my TV app so basically this has an IR blaster so he does include your TV programming as well and then you can just select highlights which basically automatically selects it for you now you can make changes here by going to plus so this allows you to add additional services such as The Associated Press Reuters The Huffington Post and other things from entertainment food etc etc and then we have other tabs here so we can select categories we can select custom topics so we can search by topic so for example if you want to do Android you could do that as well services and apps again these are apps that can take Vantage of it such as Instagram so if you want to enable Instagram for blinkfeed just tap on it and then you'll just have to login to authorize blinkfeed to use it now if you swipe to the right you get to your classic home screen this is where you can arrange apps you know say if your app drawer which is where you can pick up more apps and as you can see they've already done a nice job of arranging them so you can actually live entirely in this sort of viewer here you don't have to use your home screen to arrange apps all your apps will be here and you can arrange them in also you can hide them if you want so if you don't want to see all these apps just go to settings up here manage apps or hide/unhide apps and you can select certain apps you want to hide so that's actually very useful actually really like this system so you don't really necessarily have to have two places to look up apps you can just use your app drawer and keep your home screen free but of course you have options now you have several options for managing your app drawer so you can do most recent you can arrange by an alphabetical or you can do custom which includes all the folding and then we have a quick access to the Google Play Store which I actually find very useful so you can always know where the Google Play Store app is just by going to your app drawer now if you tap and hold on the home screen you get to this editor this allows you to change which home screen you want to be your home screen and whether you want to turn blinkfeed on or not so you can now turn it off if you prefer so it completely turns it off disappears and now you have the classic home screen and nothing else now I can also customize your home screen so right now by default the blinkfeed screen is the home screen but if you select one of the other home screens and set that as the your home screen now when you hit home and takes you to the classic home screen so you can get away from blinkfeed that way without deleting it now this is also where we get our widgets so we can add a widget to our screen or we can select apps or shortcuts so let's go ahead and add one of our widgets just to show you how this works so let me go ahead and grab the calendar widget now we can take it up to any one of the home screens we want to drop it in go ahead and drop it there so there we go now we can hold it move it around and resize it and if we don't want it tap and hold it take it up to remove and there goes now in terms of blinkfeed if you see any story that interests you I have to do is tap on it takes you right to the app or website that it originates from and you can read it in full now I just want to talk about our Android controls again these are off screen backlit capacitive controls they're a little dimly-lit compared to the East tc1 I think that's my biggest complaint with them besides their location that would be nice if the home button was toward the center or all of these were put on the home screen or on the screen itself I tend to prefer virtual buns just because I think they're easier to operate by anyway if we press the home button takes you to the home screen back takes you back but in order to get to the recent apps you have to double tap the home button takes you to recent apps in this highly customized version of it so you can see the most recent app is in the lower right corner the oldest is in the left and you're limited to nine at any given time so if you open up another app the oldest app will be closed now this also allows us to quickly jump to any one of them and then we can also swipe them out of the way to close them now you can adjust the behavior of the home button under settings so for example if you tap and hold the home button by default it takes you to Google now but I've changed it to bring me to settings so no matter what app you're in it takes you right to settings but of course settings toggles or buttons will appear in the app now you can also swipe up on the home 1 to take you to Google now so you can see quickly launches Google now and you can do that from anywhere on that device now let's go and talk about the fingerprint scanner so I'm just going to go to our quick toggle here to get to fingerprint and now I've already programmed this for my fingerprint previously so it needs to authorize it so I'm going to swipe here that didn't work this time it had been working so let's try again and there you go now as you can see it's kind of an awkward position generally you can find it but you do kind of to swipe your finger across the camera lens sometimes to do it so it can be a little strange to use especially with such a large phone to find the right spot but here you can see I've already programmed two fingers my left index finger for unlocking and launching the camera my right index finger for just unlocking the phone I can program one more action so you can program three fingers three actions click continue you can select which finger you want to program so I'm just going to go with my middle finger here and now I'm going to go ahead and swipe my finger let's see if I can do this on camera now once it's learn my fingerprint I can assign an action to it so let's click OK so you can see we have a few things we can do we can launch the camera we can go to the home screen we can launch voice assistant or choose an app so let's go and choose an app I'm just curious about that so let's say we want to launch Instagram that's an amp use a light you should be following me there for not so good the Instagram so I'm going to swipe my middle finger and there it goes launched Instagram now the fingerprint scanner isn't 100% reliable so for example my left finger is designed or set up to launch the camera app but for whatever reason I can't see it just does not recognize it so we'll keep doing this until I get to my passcode which you do have to program when you set the fingerprint unlock but for whatever reason my right index finger seems to work all the time now in terms of apps that come with the phone we do have some Verizon apps which are in this folder here for us those of course come with a Verizon foam but we also have Amazon content which comes with HTC phones we have Google as well so all of these standard Google apps are included we have our media apps which includes some google apps and then we have a few other apps such as the TV remote app which I still have to set up basically you use this to control your a/v equipment so we learned your a/v equipment your channel settings whether or service you're using and automatically programs it gives you a little tutorial so I'm in the United States I'm going to enter in my zip code so you can see the shows that are playing right now on your local channels and you can set up your remote as well so this is where you have to program your devices in so you can select which TV you have I do have a Samsung click Next and then basically will coach you through the process and then we'll run the IR code to see if it works for you so once it's learned all your devices you're good to go and you can control your TV and directly from your phone now of course if you need to get back to your TV app just bring down your drop down shade and you have these quick toggles right in the notification panel so you can mute your audio you can turn off your equipment or close the app entirely or just jump right into the remote app under tools we'll find a few other features including our clock our customized HTC clock then we have scribble which was the Notes app now this no longer syncs to Evernote as it did with the HTC One then we have kid mode which allows you to control what content you want displayed on your device while your children are using it now we also have this car app which basically sets up the phone for easier use in the car so you can see these large oversized buttons your navigation options as well as the phone dialer so if we go to navigation here this gives you ways of searching for Pio eyes such as gas stations things in Google Maps previous destination restaurant dining by photo parking cafes bars ATMs that sort of thing so again large buns for easy use in the car but of course you can also use voice navigation as well alright so let's going to take a look at some of our settings so if we go to settings you can see we've got this little bounce effect when we scroll through and we reach the end the settings panel so pretty standard stuff Wi-Fi Bluetooth toggles mobile data data usage if you go the more you get some more settings for networking such as setting up a VPN and we do have NFC technology built in here as well so if we go to that you can see some of our settings here so you can toggle it on or off display gestures and buttons this is where you can customize the behavior of the home button so right here our home button by default it has swipe or press and hold for Google now I've changed it to swipe up for Google now and press and hold for the menu and now so you can change your font sizes brightness screen timeout notification light so if you want certain notifications to activate the LED you can select those they're all all on by default now I can also change the speed of the home button double click so if you want normal slow or very slow you all set HTC gestures and the G sensor calibration which you can all do from this panel sound as well so this is where you can control some major sound of course they have eliminated the Beats Audio profile so that equaliser isn't here but of course you can install your own now if you go the sound you'll find some other settings here such as vibration do not disturb which you can toggle on and off also from the drop down menu change your ringtones now has two settings here which you can toggle on and off which are on by default so quiet ring on pink up so it will lower the ring volume when you pick up your phone also pocket mode so it blasts the speaker louder when it's in your pocket or in the bag we also have our fingerprint scans setup tool so this is where you can go there to set that up or change it storage options so this is where you can see how much storage you're currently using we have our app manager accounts and sync backup assistant Plus which is a Verizon utility location security languaging keyboards backup and reset date/time accessibility software update and about this phone now under the power settings will find our battery life as well as our usage history so you can see what apps are using the most battery and we see our complete history and timeline I get excellent battery life with this I can easily get three days of heavy use out of this mattock so it's really impressive that's including LTE or Wi-Fi use now the one max also has a kid mode which you can activate by tapping them holding the power button and in addition to restarting airplane mode and power off you can also enable kid mode which I've not set up here but this allows you to kind of sandbox your device so they only have access to certain files and apps now in terms of this display again 5.9 inch Super LCD three so excellent IPS display with bright whites good contrast excellent off excess viewing angles very color accurate a very vibrant vivid display but not overblown like an OLED display so definitely one of the best features of this device is the display that was true of the HTC One as well now it's not quite as pixel dense as the HTC One so this has 373 PPI by contrast the iPhone as 326 while the HTC One has 469 so still really excellent text is pin-sharp even the smallest text is absolutely legible without pinching in and out so you can see text looks excellent on this device so it makes it an excellent eReader so if you want to use this for reading text it looks great now as I said we have HTC boomsound and these speakers are excellent or even better than the HTC One for perhaps the best sounding mobile device you can buy right now so let's go ahead and test this out just going to load one of my recent videos what's up guys my gear Borgen it's finally that time of the year to take a look back at 2013 to see what Apple did throughout the year and what my personal top 5 picks are from that year so before we get to the top 5 let's recap starting off with him so they're not only loud I mean they're not obnoxious loud or blowing out loud but they're really clear especially if you hold this device closer to you you really get the depth of sound with those stereo speakers so definitely a real good selling point with this phone all right so let's go and take a look at the camera app which is pretty nice so we have our filters we're pretty familiar with plenty of filters I'm not going to go through all of them we have our show to release tap to focus you can also tap and hold to lock exposure and focus tap anywhere again to release it so we can take our photo we can record video as well and then we can snap photos while recording video as you can see it adds it to the gallery and then when we're done go right to the guy wait to see what we've done so you can see we can playback or video or take a look at the photos we've shot now we can also enable Zoe mode now Zoe basically when you take a photo it records a small segment of video before and after the photo is taken so when you take a photo looks like a normal photo but if you go to the gallery you'll actually see it appear as sort of a label segment see there we go so you can a little audio and everything with that Zoe we also have our settings down here so we have our scene mode so we can select normal we can also go to our drop-down and pick other things like landscape backlit text macro that sort of thing and then we also have night mode HDR sweep panorama dual capture anti-shake so we do have sort of a software stabilization in here as well now dole capture basically allows you to record both the front-facing and rear-facing camera at the same time again this is similar to Samsung's dual shot mode if you're familiar with it so that's also there as well and you can move it around now generally speaking image quality is pretty decent so for example is outside at night using the flash and it did a pretty decent job filling the scene with light and the low-light performance of the camera made up for the rest so if I turn the flash off I still got pretty decent results in dark conditions although without optical image stabilization some of these shots turn out blurrier than others depends on when you press that shutter so you can see this is blurrier than the next scene so if I go to the next shot you can see I got a sharper shot so you do get more mixed results without optical image stabilization because the lens isn't as stable as you'd like to see it so otherwise low-light performance is definitely the highlight of this camera now just to give you an idea of the relative system performance of the one max versus other phone so we have the one max and the one both score very similarly which is to be expected because we're running the same hardware now the note 3 is running a Snapdragon 800 processor so we do get better single core score but a weaker multi-core score and then we have the iPhone which is quite a ways ahead here with more than double the single core score and a much better multi-core score as well so you can see this is sort of mid-range in terms of performance but it still gets ahead quite well I mean there's no system issues in terms of performance it's a really smooth operating phone and HTC Sense is not a heavy skin so it seems to be well optimized and I've had no performance or notable performance issues or frame dropping in terms of the user experience so really no complaints in terms of power now just to give you a size comparison with other large phones the note 3 the galaxy mega 6.3 and the Z ultra this is the Google Play edition the Z ultra is 6.4 this is 6.3 so you can see that the HTC One for a screen size is a relatively large device and that's because there's more device around the display than some of these other phones are actually this is actually kind of similar to the Z ultra which has I think a little too much bezel around it to be as usable as it could be just because there's just so much room in the way of using the displace with this large bezel which gets in the way and that's similar to the ECC 1 but HTC One does have feels a little more comfortable use it is slightly smaller in hazlet rounded corners so those are more comfortable use also feels really nice in the hand because of that convexed shape as opposed to the flat or angular shapes now the mega is still one of the better devices in terms of ergonomics for large phones this is still a really lightweight rounded and comfortable to handle X you really like this phone but I think the biggest phone I can handle is probably something like the note 3 it's about the right size I actually feel small compared to these devices now I actually used to feel big but compared to those devices this feels quite manageable now of course this is much bigger than something like the iPhone so the iPhone is quite a bit smaller that's understandable the iPhone is one of the smaller phones out there a 4-inch display so in conclusion the HTC One Maxx kind of lives up to the HTC One it's based on excellent build quality beautiful display excellent audio thanks to these stereo speakers and a pretty decent camera it's not the best camera still I think to low resolution but it's an excellent low-light camera for most situations it's still a great camera it would be nice to have had optical image stabilization like the HTC One but it's still pretty decent and the fingerprint scanner is actually pretty good it works pretty well I find it really only works on my right index finger maybe for left-handed will work better on your left index finger but for me that's really the only finger works well on now my only real complaints here remain from the HTC one and that's the non-traditional placement of the Android controls and particularly on a large phone so the home button is in the very uncomfortable position so every time I want to reach for the home button kind of have to tuck in my thumb to reach it and that's also true on the left hand so on the left hand the home button is now too far away so it'd be nice if it was toward the center or if they put the buttons back on the screen and the same with the back button it's kind of a far reach on the right hand and it's also a little too close on the left hand for such a large display that you're gripping higher up so I'd like to see them change this as well and we still have the problem with the back panel which doesn't quite fit as well as it should but otherwise excellent build quality excellent display audio and performance and of course battery life is definitely a big selling future here and it's one of the best so that's going to do for me in this video hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you again in the next one alright guys Mike here a Detroit Board testing out the front-facing camera of the HTC One Maxx again 2.1 megapixels good for 1080p video at 30 frames per second and also features HDR so it's quite a decent camera it's one of the better front-facing cameras have used on any phone I think the only weakness is audio pickup so you have to tell me how the audio sounds but I think it's not as good as something like the iPhone which has excellent audio pickup so let's go and take a look at the performance of the main camera alright so this is the main camera and of course I have my favorite subject Zoe & Chloe so they're going to be my stand ins today hey Zoe so let's see we have tap to focus so we can tap to focus while recording video doesn't seem to do it automatically hey Zoe now this isn't the best lighting condition so you can see they're a little more variable and has a harder time with white balance right now there we go let's see if it's going to focus for me yeah see do you have to tap the scene' to refocus alright so let's go outside in bright light conditions and see how it performs you you\n"