HTC U11 Life review

HTC isn’t a company afraid to try new things. In the last few years several of these haven’t panned out too well, like the HTC U Ultra’s second touchscreen, but the HTC U11 Life is a phone with a concept we can appreciate immediately.

It’s a mid-range phone with an accessible price that uses Google’s new Android One program. This means you get an almost untouched version of Android, with the aim of getting much faster updates than other mobiles. That is, unless you're in the US, in which case you get HTC's Sense skin on top.

There are notable shortfalls to match the cut-down price tag, like poor low light photo quality, relatively weak speakers and a body made of plastic. But it’s a solid choice for those on a mid-size budget.

HTC U11 Life price and availability

The HTC U11 Life costs $349/£349 (around AU$460), half the price of top-end alternatives and a lot less than the full-fat HTC U11.

It sees it rub shoulders with the likes of the Honor 9, Moto X4, Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact and Samsung Galaxy A5. These are some seriously strong mid-range contenders which ensure the U11 Life won't have an easy ride.

Key features

• Pressure-sensitive sides help it stand out
• Smart compromises other than the battery

There are two main ways to view the HTC U11 Life. It’s a much cheaper alternative to the original HTC U11 that gets you a roughly similar experience, with some parts cut down to lower costs.

It’s also an Android One phone in most regions, meaning it uses the standard Android interface, making it a little like a Google Pixel phone not made by Google.

Core elements it inherits from its bigger, more expensive brother include a shiny, curved rear and pressure-sensitive sides that enable gestures not seen in other phones.

This is HTC’s attempt to stand out. It may not change how you use a phone, but HTC has made it customizable enough to let you dig deep and make the feature your own.

Cost compromises are, for the most part, not too glaring. The screen is 1080p rather than ultra-high resolution, and the HTC U11 Life’s chipset is a mid-range Snapdragon 630 rather than a top-tier chipset. Major improvement in the graphics chip means it performs well in real life, though.

As is common among mid-range phones, the camera can’t quite compete with the best in all situations. Great photo processing makes day-lit photos often look fantastic, but it falters at night and fine detail isn’t as sharp or clear as that of a higher-quality, lower-resolution sensor.

The build isn’t quite on-par with the HTC U11 either. That phone has a glass back, the U11 Life an acrylic/plastic one. The biggest difference in feel is that while glass is cold to the touch when there’s the slightest chill in the air, plastic isn’t.

You’ll have to decide whether that matters to you or not.

After using the phone for a while the only compromise that we think might annoy some is battery life. While not flat-out poor, the Moto X4 and Honor 9 last longer between charges. The HTC U11 Life’s 2,600mAh battery is just not all that big.

Design

• Smooth plastic/acrylic back
• Fingerprint scanner
• Squeezable pressure-sensitive sides

From arm’s length the HTC U11 Life looks a lot like the normal U11, which is a more expensive phone. The back is curved and shiny, reacting to light as if the stuff gets it excited.

However, the HTC U11 Life’s back is made of “acrylic glass” rather than actual glass. And what’s acrylic glass? Plastic.

There’s none of the cool hardness that comes with metal or glass, and as a result the HTC U11 Life does not feel particularly expensive. The Moto G5S Plus, Moto X4 and Honor 9 all feel more impressive.

The HTC U11 Life’s build is pleasant enough, though. HTC has made sure there are no hard, flat surfaces. Everything is smooth and curvy, while the ultra-accessible 5.2-inch screen welcomes hands of all sizes.

This is not, however, one of the new breed of phones with an ultra-narrow screen surround. There are a couple of blank millimeters to each side, and about an inch above and below the screen.

It seems petty to make too much of an issue of this right now, though, when the trend is only developing, not quite the norm yet. Let your eyes decide whether you’re bothered or not.

Other parts of the HTC U11 Life hardware are sound too. The phone has IP67 water resistance, meaning it can take being submerged, and there’s a good fingerprint scanner on the front.

Some versions of the HTC U11 Life have an excellent 64GB storage too. Ours has “just” 32GB, but buy from HTC and you get 64GB. Ours is the European model, where the US and UK get the 4GB RAM/64GB edition.

The hardware feature that sets the HTC U11 Life apart, though, is Edge Sense. This uses pressure sensors on the sides of the phone to enable gestures when those sides are squeezed. As standard, a quick squeeze launches the camera and a long one fires-up the Google digital assistant.

However, Edge Sense can be customized too. It can zoom in Google Maps or Google Photos, snooze alarms, or answer calls. These are sensibly disabled as standard because HTC doesn’t want you to accidentally fire off these features and start thinking your phone is haunted.

You can even create your own macros by going into an app and “recording” commands. We doubt whether many HTC U11 Life buyers will put the effort in, but HTC is clearly trying hard to squeeze the most out of Edge Sense.

HTC introduced Edge Sense with the U11: it’s not an old feature.

One omission may kill the appeal of the HTC U11 Life for some of you, though. It doesn’t have a headphone jack, just a USB-C port. A reasonable pair of USB-C earphones is included, but there’s no 3.5mm adaptor.

Screen

• 5.2-inch Full HD LCD screen
• Good image quality

The HTC U11 Life has a smaller, lower-resolution screen than the U11. However, it’s a punchy display that, in most conditions, doesn’t look much worse than any phone out there.

It’s a 5.2-inch 1080 x 1920 Super LCD. There’s not too much brightness loss at an angle, and color is well-saturated without looking overdone. The image also appears very close to the top surface, a sign of an advanced super-thin screen architecture.

You have to take the HTC U11 Life into a more extreme environment to see its limits. We’re not talking Bear Grylls fodder, just that you’ll see very slightly raised blacks in a darkened room, and the brightness is bright but not quite the 1000 nits of the brightest. That said, we took the phone out on a fairly bright day and the screen was still clearly visible.

HTC’s website claims there’s a feature that lets you customize the display color profile, but it’s not in the software of our model.

Battery life

• Mediocre stamina in this class
• 2,600mAh cell
• USB-C Charging

The HTC U11 Life has a 2,600mAh battery, smaller than those of the Moto G5S Plus, the Honor 9 or the Moto X4.

Thanks to the energy improvements of the Snapdragon 630 chipset, stamina is just about acceptable. However, on busier phone days when we’ve streamed a few hours of podcasts over 4G, the HTC U11 Life needed a top up hours before bed time.

If you want a phone that lasts through a day (almost) no matter what you subject it to, the HTC U11 Life isn’t the best choice.

Results in our usual battery benchmark were poor too. A 90-minute video played at maximum brightness takes 35% off the battery level. The Moto X4 lost just 10%.

Camera

• Excellent HDR processing
• Fine detail often looks soft close-up
• Poor low light image quality

The HTC U11 Life is one of the best arguments for computational photography you’ll find. In certain conditions the results it can pull out of what appears to be a somewhat unremarkable sensor are, well, remarkable.

Its dynamic range optimization is at times staggeringly good, with shadow detail when shooting right into the sun similar to what you might see in shots taken with an APS-C camera. For the non photography nerds out there, this is kind of sensor used by compact system and DSLR cameras that cost up to $1000/£1000.

This is down to a merging of several exposures with just about every shot you take. For sunset photos and nature shots where the sun is peeking out behind a tree, this is a fantastic benefit. Dynamic range is often comparable with that of the best phone cameras available right now. It’s Instagram-tastic.

Look a little closer and you can see some of the limitations of the hardware, though. The HTC U11 Life has a 16MP sensor, and while HTC hasn’t announced the exact sensor used, it’s almost certainly one with smaller sensor pixels.

Up close, fine details have much less integrity than those of the best 12MP sensors. At pixel level images look simultaneously soft and a little noisy, even in daylight.

So while the resolution is high, lower-res cameras can actually reproduce much better, cleaner detail. Like other cameras struggling against the limits of the hardware, the HTC U11 Life tends to struggle with very vivid red tones as well.

Night photo quality is also poor. There’s no optical image stabilization to allow slower exposures, and consequently fine detail disappears completely. This is a great camera for tricky daylight conditions (as long as you don’t zoom in), but a poor one at night.

The HTC U11 Life also lacks a background blur portrait mode, which is usually, but not always, restricted to phones with dual rear cameras. You do get a Pro mode, which saves DNG (RAW) files instead of JPGs, but such a mode shines with a camera with a more versatile sensor and stabilized lens.

On the front, the 8MP selfie camera is nothing special either. Again, fine detail looks soft.

Video capture goes up to 4K resolution for the rear camera, though, and there’s a 120fps slow motion mode.

Interface and reliability

• Android 8.0 in a mostly pure form
• Likely to receive prompt updates
• HTC’s alterations are minimal and subtle

The HTC U11 Life runs Android 8.0 and is one of the first phones to be part of the Android One program. This means it uses the standard Android interface rather than HTC Sense, the custom look seen in the original HTC U11 and most other HTC phones.

Or at least, it does in most of the world. However, US buyers will get the usual HTC overlay.

Android One is no bad thing. Google’s interface is clean, attractive and intuitive. For example, you simply flick up anywhere on the home screen to bring up the vertical apps menu. It responds to the speed of the gesture too, giving it a more fluid feel than most rival interfaces.

There are still the familiar Android soft keys too. Little light-up Back and Recent Apps icons appear to each side of the fingerprint scanner whenever the HTC U11 Life is in use.

If you’ve not used Android 8.0 yet, you’ll also notice the little dots by some of the icons. This means there are notifications pending for that app, and you can see them by long-pressing the icon, as well as dragging down the notification bar.

Movies, music and gaming

• Great gaming performance
• No headphone jack
• Rivals have better speakers

There are no extra apps to get on your nerves in the HTC U11 Life. Even extra features like Edge Sense are built into the Settings menu rather than cluttering up your apps menu.

This leaves you with Play Music for tunes and Play Movies for video. These are great apps that let you play your own files as well as streaming or purchasing titles from Google’s library. Naturally, Google would rather you do the latter and this plays out in their layouts.

It’s the hardware side that comes to define, and limit, the HTC U11 Life’s media cred. First, there’s no headphone jack. This means you (probably) can’t plug-in your favorite headphones without an adaptor and can’t charge the battery and use headphones at the same time. Again, unless you have a special adaptor.

The earphones that come in the box are on-par with a decent budget pair of in-ears, and will do the job if you’re not too picky about sound quality. They can also be custom-tuned to your hearing and have noise cancellation. Both of these use a mic inside the earphones.

This tuning makes the sound more lively but also a bit more aggressive, highlighting the lack of finesse of the drivers. The noise cancelling is nowhere near as effective as almost any pair of active noise cancellation earphones either.

Testing them out on the road, they do appear to reduce the rustle of cable noise a little, but do not significantly reduce traffic noise.

Don’t get too excited about the bundled earphones.

The HTC U11 Life’s speaker isn’t best-in-class either. Max volume is lower than that of the Moto G5S Plus or Honor 9, and there’s a little less power to the lower frequencies.

It’s still a useful little speaker, though, with sound quality good enough for podcasts and the odd emergency music duty. It sits on the bottom edge, so there’s no stereo effect when you play a game.

General gaming performance is very good, particularly given the HTC U11 Life uses a mid-range CPU. Frame rates in high-end games like Real Racing 3, Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger 2 are all very smooth, closer to the performance we expect from a true top-end phone.

Performance and benchmarks

• Mid-range CPU does a great job
• Snapdragon 630 CPU
• Newly-upgraded graphics chipset

The HTC U11 Life has a Snapdragon 630 chipset. In Geekbench 4, its scores are very similar to those of its predecessor, the Snapdragon 625, with 4,125 points in this case. However, there are some notable improvements.

First, and this explains the great gaming performance, Qualcomm has significantly improved the graphics chipset. The Adreno 508 is clocked at 850MHz, up from 650MHz in the Snapdragon 625.

It also has a faster 4G modem, and approaches its processor cores differently. Like the other 6-series Snapdragon CPUs, all the cores are Cortex-A53s (a classic “budget” core), but Qualcomm has moved to using four lower-clocked ones and four faster performance ones. Rather than eight at the same speed.

The aim is to improve battery life without compromising performance.

Verdict

The HTC U11 Life is a great phone in many respects. Screen, software, and day-to-day performance are all grumble-free, and while the squeezable sides may not be a revelation they are almost radically customizable. And therefore about as useful as is currently imaginable.

Battery life is just okay, and, like quite a lot of mid-range phones, the camera is not great at night. However, the HTC U11 Life is enjoyable to use and represents good, if not truly disruptive, value.

As the price of top-end phones spirals around, and above, $1000/£1000, our appreciation for phones at prices normal people can stomach only grows.

Who's this for?

The HTC U11 Life is for those who want a phone with a touch of design glamour without the cost of a top-end model.

It’s also a good choice for people tired of custom Android interfaces, because (outside the US) Android One provides Google’s software as its engineers intended, with HTC’s extras laid on top like a pretty belt, braces and bangles that can be removed if you like.

Should you buy it?

The HTC U11 Life’s biggest problem, if you don’t mind the missing headphone jack, is competition. There are a lot of great alternatives, many of which have metal or glass frames for a more expensive feel. The Moto X4, Moto G5S Plus, Honor 9 are the obvious alternatives.

Does it matter? That’s up to you. The Moto X4 and Honor 9 also have more consistent, more versatile cameras, although neither has quite the HDR chops of the HTC U11 Life.

With better build and battery life, we’re leaning slightly towards the Moto and Honor options. However, as all three are good value phones most will enjoy, you’ll have to decide whether the intrigue of the HTC U11 Life’s squeezy sides is enough to tilt you the other way.

First reviewed: November 2017