HTC One SV review: Picking up speed

Android ICS with HTC Sense

The HTC One SV comes with Android 4.0.4 and Sense 4.1. At a time, when Android Jelly Bean is quickly becoming the standard for new devices in all tiers, we did find the presence of ICS in the One SV a bit odd. We've seen this particular combo of ICS and Sense several times already on the HTC One series phones, so don't be surprised if it looks familiar.

Here's a video demo of the UI in action:

The lockscreen is quite functional. There are the usual four shortcuts and a ring at the bottom. You can either drag the ring towards the center of the screen to unlock the phone, or any of the shortcuts into the ring to unlock the phone and launch the corresponding app.

The Sense 4.1 lockscreen

Leap view is at your service - tap the home key (while on the default homescreen) or do a pinch gesture to zoom out (with an awesome animation) to display the thumbnails of all seven homescreen panes at once. Upon a press and hold you can drag to reposition the homescreen panes. A small "home" icon indicates the default homescreen.

Leap view

On the homescreen, you get an auto-hiding indicator of which screen you're on and a brand new dock with five shortcuts - the middle one is locked to the app drawer, while the other four can be customized as you please (you can even put a folder there, if four shortcuts isn't enough).

You can have as many as seven homescreens - and with all the excellent preloaded widgets, you might want to keep all of them.

Some of the homescreen sections

The Sense UI offers one of the most full-featured customization suites around. The proprietary Scenes interface lets you choose from various custom homescreen setups, which provide new wallpaper and widget sets that can be further customized to suit your needs. This version of Sense only comes with one preloaded, but hitting the 'Get More' button on the upper right will take you to the HTC Hub where you can download additional Scenes.

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds, but they're a handy feature if you want to quickly change your phone's setup, such as going from work to home.

The HTC Sense has another customization option called Skins. Every skin changes the look and feel of most of the onscreen buttons, application screens, option menus, and other items. They also come with unique wallpaper each and use different colors for various UI elements. The One SV comes with a total of two preloaded skins, although like with Scenes, it's easy to get more.

Setting a Skin from the Personalization menu

The main menu has the typical grid layout, which is composed of vertical pages with shortcuts sorted alphabetically. You can set different sorting options - alphabetical, most recent or oldest - but you can't rearrange them manually. There are Search and Play Store shortcuts along with a menu for some options.

The app drawer in Sense 4.1

The App Drawer uses a tabbed layout similar to different Sense elements (such as the phonebook). There are three tabs available at the bottom - All apps, Frequent and Downloads. You can rearrange them or remove Frequent and Downloads if you don't need them.

The Personalize app also has Sound customizations - you can pick a Sound set or individual ringtone, notification and alarm sounds.

The Personalize menu does Sound too

Adding widgets to the homescreen is done in a similar fashion to Honeycomb and is one of the less successful changes since Sense went ICS.

You press and hold on the homescreen and everything zooms out so that the homescreen panes are visible as thumbnails on the top row of the screen. You tap a homescreen to select it and then select a widget to add to it (or you can just drag the widget).

Adding a widget to the homescreen

The main problem here is with how widgets are selected - they are shown four at a time and there's a lot of scrolling involved. Widgets are available in multiple versions - usually differing in size, but also functionality - and they're all dumped into the list, so you're scrolling through a lot of duplicates.

There's a search option to speed things along or you can choose a widget from the dropdown menu and then select which size you like, but that still feels like an extra step.

Editing the homescreen is different from vanilla Android. You can tap and hold on a widget and you can drag across homescreen panes. While you're dragging a widget (or shortcut or whatever), two fields appear at the top of the screen - Edit and Remove. You can drop the widget on either one to perform the corresponding action.

When it is highlighted, Edit can be used to modify the settings of a widget - e.g. choose a different folder for the Photo Frame album or even choose a different version of the Clock widget. This saves you the trouble of first deleting a widget and then putting it on the screen again to choose a different version, setting and so on.

Dragging a widget gives you options

The notification area no longer has the list of recent apps - it's reserved for notifications only. No more tabs and toggles either, although you get a Settings shortcut here if you need to power something on or off. There's also a Clear button to dismiss all notification or you can swipe them off one by one.

The notification area

Pressing the task switcher button on any screen displays a list of all your recently accessed apps, which you can remove with a swipe to the left or right. This is really just a quick way to access apps you've used recently, as swiping away doesn't kill them.

To actually terminate a running app, you have to close it via the traditional task manager we've become familiar with from Gingerbread. It's simple to use - each running app is listed with an indication of how much RAM it's using (no CPU usage reading though). You can terminate apps one by one and there's a Stop All button too.

The standard task switcher • The task manager

Synthetic benchmarks

The HTC One SV is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with two 1.2 GHz Krait cores and Adreno 305 GPU. The smartphone also offers 1GB worth of RAM, which adds up to a pretty good combination.

BenchmarkPi focuses on the CPU's per-core calculative performance. The One SV took advantage of its Krait cores and posted an excellent score here, even if its lower clock speed prevented it from coming near the best we have seen.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• HTC One S
  306
• HTC One SV
  352
• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  372
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  447
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  452
• LG Optimus L9
  480
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  499
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  530
• HTC Sensation XE
  536
• Sony Xperia S
  536
• Sony Xperia sola
  551
• HTC Desire X
  639

On the overall performance benchmark Quadrant the One SV posted an incredible score beating lots of quad-core droids and equaling the score of the Samsung Galaxy S III. The lower resolution has certainly helped in the graphics part of the test, though.

Quadrant

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S III
  5365
• HTC One SV
  5357
• HTC One X (Snapdragon S4)
  5146
• HTC One S
  5047
• HTC One X (Tegra 3)
  4842
• LG Optimus 4X
  4814
• Samsung Galaxy Note
  3531
• Sony Xperia S
  3173
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  3053
• LG Optimus L9
  3019
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  2644
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  2316

SunSpider and BrowsermMark test the Javascript performance, while BrowserMark adds a touch of HTML 5. The One SV aced both tests.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Premier
  1171
• HTC One SV
  1427
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus
  1626
• HTC One S
  1708
• Samsung Galaxy S II
  1849
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  1888
• LG Optimus L9
  2029
• Apple iPhone 4S
  2217
• HTC Desire X
  2259
• Sony Xperia S
  2587
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  2663
• Sony Xperia sola
  2837

BrowserMark 2

Higher is better

• LG Optimus G
  2555
• HTC One SV
  2034
• Acer CloudMobile S500
  1877
• Nokia Lumia 820
  1760
• Samsung Omnia W
  1632
• LG Optimus L9
  1329
• Samsung Galaxy S III (JB)
  1247
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  714
• Sony Xperia J
  587

So obviously the HTC One SV is a pretty good performer, fighting it out with way more expensive smartphones when it comes to synthetic performance. More importantly it does very well in real life and pushes the Sense 4.1 over Ice Cream Sandwich quite fast. There were no hiccups to speak off though the One SV wasn't as smooth as the Project Butter Jelly Bean droids.