PC Magazine July 2017

Battery life on the 3,000mAh cell was good, at seven hours and one minute of
LTE video streaming with the screen on full brightness. The phone supports
Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology but not wireless charging.
ANDROID AND PERFORMANCE
The U11 runs Android 7.1 with HTC’s relatively aggressive skin. The skin doesn’t
hold back performance: With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor
platform on board, we got absolutely terrific benchmark scores and all-around
smooth performance. The phone has 64GB of storage, 11.54GB of which is taken
up by system files, plus room for a microSD card in the nano SIM card slot.
The most exciting new feature, of course, is the squeeze sensor, which HTC calls
Edge Sense. A sensor area about two-thirds of the way down the sides of the
phone can be calibrated to your liking when you set the phone up. Then when
you squeeze it, it’ll launch the camera or the flashlight. The sensor is completely
customizable—you can actually use it to launch any app, and HTC says it will
release an app that lets the Edge Sense hook into other apps on your phone, as a
click action within the apps.
Yes, it’s a gimmick. It’s not going to change your life. But it’s a useful gimmick,
much like Motorola’s twist-to-camera feature. I
ended up using it less than I thought I would,
though, because I found the U11 to be a little
uncomfortably wide to securely grip and
squeeze in my hand. Folks with larger hands
will likely get more use out of it.
HTC’s most imposing change is to put
NewsRepublic news headlines on
your lock screen. Turn it off, and
you’ll still get aggressive
NewsRepublic alerts in your
notifications. Fortunately, you can
disable NewsRepublic entirely.
You’ll still see news headlines in
Blinkfeed, the Flipboard-like page
found to the left of the main home
screen.