HTC U12+ Review

Four months before the U12+ was announced, HTC sold about two thousand of its phone engineers to Google for $1.1 billion, and the phone reads like the last work of a shrinking team. The specification is fine: a Snapdragon 845 with 6GB of RAM, a 6-inch 1440 by 2880 Super LCD 6 with HDR10, IP68, a 3500 mAh battery, a 12 megapixel main camera with 1.4 micron pixels and stabilisation beside a 16 megapixel 2x telephoto, and two 8 megapixel cameras on the front.

DxOMark scored it 103, second only to the P20 Pro that spring, and the photographs earn that. Then the buttons. HTC replaced the power and volume keys with pressure-sensitive pads that do not move, backed by a haptic buzz. They registered phantom presses in a pocket, missed real ones, and made the phone impossible to operate blind; a June 2018 update improved them and a later one improved them again, and no update made them feel like buttons.

Edge Sense 2 squeeze and double-tap gestures, which had been charming on the U11, now had to carry the phone. The LCD is good but flat and dim beside the OLEDs of the S9 and Pixel 2 XL, the battery lasts a day, there is no headphone jack and no wireless charging. It shipped on Android 8.0 Oreo with a light Sense skin, got Android 9 Pie in the summer of 2019 and nothing after. At $799 for 64GB it asked flagship money. No HTC flagship followed.