HTC now offers three phones in the U11 series: the original
5.5-inch HTC U11 we liked, the affordable 5.2-inch HTC U11 Life and the top-end
6-inch HTC U11 +. Does this latest flagship model provide enough to justify the
high price tag? The HTC U11 + has the reflection of its predecessor on the
back, which has a hypnotic effect, sometimes slate gray and black in others.
It's the perfect back plate for narcissists since it provides great reflection,
but I found it rather slippery and also a very efficient fingerprint magnet.
The power and volume buttons stay in the same place as the
HTC U11 on the right side. However, the home button / fingerprint scanner below
the screen is set in favor of a circle sensor on the back. For larger handheld
devices, a rear fingerprint sensor is preferable because it greatly simplifies
one-hand operation. This is a tall, slim handset with a screen with an aspect
ratio of 18: 9, which is different from the 16: 9 HTC U11, which are 75.9 mm
wide and 153.9 mm high and 7.9 mm thick. In contrast, the HTC U11 + is slimmer
(74.9 mm), larger (158.5 mm) and thicker (8.5 mm). It's also heavier - 188 g
compared to 160 g for the U11.
The black front panel with its minimal side and small upper
and lower bezels looks rather boring, and the HTC logo on the back of the phone
gives it little distinctive. It is worth noting that the IP rating of the HTC
U11 has increased from IP67 to U68 + from IP68. This means that the dust
resistance remains unchanged while the waterproofness improves.
The 6-inch display has a resolution of 1,440 x 2,880 pixels,
resulting in an impressive 537 pixels per inch (ppi). I have been using a 18: 9
handset as the main phone for several months and appreciate this higher aspect
ratio. However, the super LCD display is not as vibrant as I would like, and
although you can toggle the color profile between sRGB and DCI-P3 and use a
slider to switch between warmer and colder color temperatures, I felt this
video (in particular) was less satisfactory than on AMOLED displays.
The HTC U11 + can be powered by the high-quality Octa-Core
Snapdragon 835 chipset from Qualcomm. There are 6GB of RAM and 128GB of memory,
of which 118GB was free on my review sample. The phone supports two SIM cards,
and the second SIM slot can be sacrificed for a higher capacity micro SD card.
Android 8.0 (Oreo) is superimposed by HTC Sense, which lets you customize the
default Android interface and provide various software enhancements. Most
notable of these is the "squeezable" feature of Edge Sense. This is
not new for HTC, but has been updated for the U11 +. Pressing on the edges of
the phone will open app shortcuts or call Edge Launcher, a semicircular dial
pad that you can scroll with your thumb to access apps and shortcuts. This can
be quite complex with two concentric "wheels" of abbreviations. If
you enable advanced mode, you can configure both short-squeeze and
squeeze-and-hold shortcuts.
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