Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Photo by Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
HTC announced a new device Monday morning: a giant smartphone with a 6-inch screen.
The One Max is the third member of the One family, so now there’s a One for everyone. Those who prefer phones of a reasonable size have the demure 4.3-inch mini. Fans of the beastly two-handers can pick up the new 5.9-inch One Max. And the rest of us can go for the flagship One, the 4.7-inch phone designed to compete with all the other Android handsets from major manufacturers that measure just below 5 inches.
HTC says the One Max will be available overseas in late October, and that you’ll be able to pick one up stateside on either Verizon or Sprint “before the holidays.”
Specs-wise, the Max is more than just a scaled-up version of the original One. It has a larger battery of course (3,300mAh), and a microSD card slot has been added. You can remove the aluminum back of the phone to swap microSD cards, but not to swap the battery. The front-facing speakers are larger on the Max, so they sound a little better. The camera is the same, but HTC has updated its software, and has made some overall tweaks to its Android skin and content browser, Blinkfeed.
There’s also a fingerprint scanner centered on the back of the Max. The idea is that if you’re holding the phone naturally, using your thumb and your last three fingers to grip the lower half, you can reach up with your index finger and stroke the sensor. One neat twist: You can set it up to launch different applications depending on which finger you swipe. So, your index finger launches the home screen, your middle finger launches Twitter, and your pinkie launches Facebook, or whatever you want. It just can’t authenticate you inside apps — for now, it only unlocks the phone.
Will the One Max sell? Well, people do seem to like the bigphones like the Galaxy Note. But the hot feature on the Note is the stylus, which can be used for writing notes and with various handwriting recognition apps. The pen has been a key to the Galaxy Note’s success in Asia, where the written characters are more complicated than ours. But the One Max doesn’t have a stylus, and I don’t know if that will make it less popular than the Note oversees. The other thing people love about bigphones is that they’re great for reading text and watching videos — they make very nice consumption devices. For that, this phone is glorious. It’s still comically large for my tastes, but I understand the thirst for these huge screens.
A full review will follow once we get our review unit (HTC probably has to ship it freight, so it might take a while).
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