HTC One Max
HTC is no longer active with phones and very little remains as far as the rest of the brand is concerned either. How different it was years ago. The smartphone manufacturer from Taiwan was a major player, both with Android devices and smartphones running Windows Phone, for example. In our 'Forgotten' section, we have already reviewed many models. These include the HTC Sensation, the HTC One M7 and, of course, the HTC Hero.
Today, it's the turn of the HTC One Max. The 2013 device was the brand's first phablet. But what was in it? Because with a 5.9-inch screen, it wasn't a big device would you think? At the time, it soon was. In fact, today's smartphone has much thinner screen bezels. Despite the HTC One Max having a relatively small screen, the screen bezels were very thick. Above and below the screen was a thick aluminium grille. This made the phone quite large in terms of size: 164.5 x 82.5 x 10.3 millimetres and weighing 217 grams. The phone was bigger than today's Galaxy S26 Ultra.
The HTC One Max offered a Super LCD3 display with a Full-HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The chipset in the device was Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor. This along with 2GB of working memory and 16GB or 32GB of storage. You could expand this with a memory card. The camera counted only 4 megapixels, up front there was room for a 2.1-megapixel front camera. Below the rear camera was the fingerprint scanner. Music lovers could use the stereo speakers, which HTC called BoomSound speakers. The battery capacity of the HTC One Max came out at 3300 mAh.
Out of the box, the HTC One Max ran on Android 4.3 Ice Cream Sandwich with HTC Sense 5.5. This included BlinkFeed, which showed you your social media updates. The smartphone from the Taiwanese manufacturer was updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop. Under the metal back, you could find the slots for the SIM and memory card. Interestingly, the battery was not swappable. The design was very similar to the HTC One Mini. If you wanted the 'Max', you had to pay €749 for it.
The phone was received quite positively by the public. The display and build quality were appreciated, as was the endurance. Downsides were the camera, the large size and the fingerprint scanner.
HTC One Max summarised in 3 points:
- Huge device
- 4-megapixel main camera
- Android with Sense UI
