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Like a punch-drunk boxer struggling to get back on his feet, HTC's fortunes have been pretty dire since Samsung launched the Galaxy S2. HTC had previously been the poster child of the Android scene, working with Google to produce such defining handsets as the Dream and Nexus One, but it had nothing in its arsenal capable of challenging Samsung's world-beating device. Since then, the company's fall from grace has been difficult to watch, with 2011's ill-fated acquisition of Beats Audio and the failure of the HTC Flyer tablet causing its position in the market to tumble. Last year's well-designed but commercially lacking HTC One X couldn't stem the tide either, and the Taiwanese firm has recently announced that its 2012 Q4 profits are down 91 per cent year-on-year.Clearly, something dramatic is required to pull HTC out of the doldrums, and the company is hoping that it will be the HTC One. Yes, that's a confusing moniker - especially when you consider that we've already had a multitude of phones which bear the "One" name - but it's apt. This is unquestionably "the one" and HTC's biggest throw of the dice in 2013; it's the company's leading product for the year and the timing of its launch - just before its rival - the Samsung Galaxy S4 - hits the marketplace cannot be considered a coincidence. HTC is laying down all of its chips on this phone, making it a gamble it can ill afford to lose.
Powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset clocked at 1.7GHz and augmented by 2GB of RAM, the HTC One certainly isn't lacking when it comes to raw power. The high-resolution screen probably has more pixels than your TV, and the impressively loud speakers enrich pastimes such as watching movies and playing games. The HTC One lacks a microSD card slot, but comes in 32/64GB sizes, which should be more than enough for most users.
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