HTC One Max review: Supersized

Organizer

Organizing is dully covered on the HTC One Max. Office documents are handled through the preloaded Polaris Office 5 app. It supports Excel, Word, PowerPoint and more and lets you view and edit files on the go.

Polaris Office 5

We tested a couple of Word and Excel files and found the One Max perfectly capable of handling them.

Polaris Office 5 editing

The calendar on the HTC One Max has been redesigned in accordance to the refreshed Sense 5.5 look. For one days aren't highlighted in a hand-drawn circle but regularly instead. Instead of the selectable tabs now the Calendar lets you side-swipe between tabs (just like in the People app).

It has four different types of view: daily, monthly, agenda and invitation. Adding a new event is quite straightforward and you can also set an alarm to serve as a reminder.

The Agenda view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. Invitation view only lists events with invitation info attached to them. The day view also shows the weather forecast at the top of the screen, which is a nice touch.

Naturally, the Calendar supports multiple online calendars (including Facebook), only one of which you can sync with your computer. You can also easily show/hide the ones you don't want.

The Calendar

Since the HTC One Max features a 5.9" display, it's very comfortable to draw on. HTC takes care of that with a new app dubbed Scribble. It's intended for note taking, making lists as well as fun activities like drawing pictures or making cards.

The HTC Scribble app

Opening it greets you with a number of available templates that can jump start your work. After you've done you can either share the scribble by uploading it to the cloud or simply save it to the phone.

There is also a calculator on board. It is nicely touch optimized with big, easy to hit buttons. Flipping it horizontally enables some more advanced functions like logarithms.

Calculator

The Clock app comes with World Clock, Alarms, Stopwatch and a Timer. The World clock is like a mini Google Earth - it shows a 3D globe and you can rotate and zoom in on it freely. You can add cities that are pinned to the globe (and also visible as a list below it).

The alarm clock application can handle multiple alarms, each with its own start and repeat time. The stopwatch and timer are pretty self explanatory.

Clock app

The HTC Tasks app is here as well. It does exactly what the name suggests and can access your Google Tasks. There is no location-based reminder support unlike with Any.DO, iOS's Reminders, etc.

HTC Tasks

HTC's Weather app is here too. It became popular years ago with its cool weather animations and widget. You can preset many cities across the globe and it uses the Yahoo! Weather info (much like Samsung and Apple do).

Weather

Google Play has all the apps

The Google Play Store features several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Apps usually have several screenshots (some even offer a demo video) so you can get an idea of what the app looks like before installing it. You can also check out comments and ratings, as well as the number of downloads and so on, to help you decide if the app is worth it.

Google Play store

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, audio and video players, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Unfortunately there is no HTC Hub in the Jelly Bean version of HTC's Android implementation. This means you can't get additional HTC wallpapers, HTC lockscreens, etc.

Google Maps finds your way

The HTC One has a built-in GPS receiver, which managed to get a lock in about 10-15 seconds (with A-GPS switched off no less). If all you need is a rough idea of where you are (within 150 meters) you can use the Cell-ID and Wi-Fi network lock, which is very fast as well.

Google Maps

Google Maps is an integral part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.

Google Street View

Popular places around the world feature pictures and reviews by people. Street view isn't available everywhere, but it is growing in coverage and is the coolest thing we've seen on a Maps app to date (that includes Aerial view in iOS).

You can save maps for offline view, which caches them on your device's storage, but keep in mind that not all map info is saved (meaning not everything down to street level like businesses, POIs, etc.).