HTC has released the new HTC One, the updated version of the last year’s best Android phone nobody bought. The Verge already has its review up, and its conclusion is exactly as you expect.
There are a lot of great Android phones on the market right now, but two stand out: the Nexus 5 and the new HTC One. The Nexus 5 is Google’s purest vision for Android, the One the platform’s most mature and developed form. I desperately wish it took better pictures, and I’m reluctant to buy or recommend it until it does, but I like absolutely everything else. It’s fast, long-lasting, does everything a phone should, and does it all with totally unparalleled class and style. From motion gestures to the Dot View case, it has genuinely new, genuinely useful features.
It may not outsell Samsung and the relentless marketing sure to follow the feature-rich Galaxy S5, but HTC executives say they don’t care. They say they just want to build a phone for people who like nice things.
It’s really hard to argue with that quality feel that last year’s One had, and which this year’s model improves. I think it’s pretty much the only Android phone that can measure up to the iPhone in this department – and now, it also has an SD card slot.
Very good they added an sdcard slot. Is the battery replaceable on these? If the bootloader ends up being locked that would pretty much ruin it for me.
Wow, what a shitty obnoxious site The Verge is.
On the plus side, nice phone from HTC.
I desperately wish it took better pictures, and I’m reluctant to buy or recommend it until it does
Give me a break. I buy a phone for ALL the features…not just the camera. The HTC One is a brilliant phone and the new camera is a major leap above the old HTC One camera. The editing software app is the absolute BEST I’ve ever seen on a smart phone.
This writer needs to stop thinking megapixels are where it’s at.
Edited 2014-03-25 18:57 UTC
What do you mean?
A friend sold his 8Mp Olympus camera to get a smartphone with more pixels.
More pixels means more detail means better pictures?
Right?
</joke>
Not always no…otherwise the Nokia 808 would have been a barn burner instead of making people want to just burn it (it had a 41 megapixel camera in it)
Unless you want to turn your smartphone pictures into movie posters…you don’t need more than 8 Megapixels.
Plus, the HTC One’s tweaks they made to the camera(s) in this version are actually quite amazing.
You may be joking but until you get into DSLR territory the phones (depending on model of course) will often take better pictures than a dedicated camera of the same or even higher cost.
I know my fiance has quit carrying her nearly $200 Fuji camera because even though its nearly double the MP of her phone we have taken photos side-by-side, changed every setting on the camera there is, and there is just no getting around the fact that the colors are better and the pictures sharper on the phone.
Easy when you hold a Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom :
http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxycamera/s4zoom/
Kochise
I’m sorry “Kochise”** but that still makes it one more device to carry around, that will inevitably not be on you when a really great shot happens right in front of you, it is just more of a PITB than its worth which is why sales of cameras below DSLR pro level have been dropping like a stone.
Instead most will end up doing like my lady and just have a phone that takes really great pictures…AND watches videos AND plays games AND plays music AND texts AND makes calls AND is a GPS unit AND does a ton of other stuff thanks to all the apps.
**-Dude what is with sticking your name at the end of each post? Its not like your name isn’t ALREADY AT THE TOP of every post you make so what is the point? Not like you see the more well known users here like Werecat, Lucas, or even Thom doing that so WTH?
Not really. The HTC One’s camera really is terrible.
Not really. Honestly, all the comments I’ve seen where people say the HTC One camera is bad are just like this one….a drive by “The HTC One camera is bad” and then no reasoning, no real discussion about the updates to the camera that make it more practical for standard users…nothing. Toothless comments.
In my opinion, the HTC One camera is only terribad if you’re looking for a phone with your primary function being a camera. And for those people, there are 3-4 others phones you can choose that are top of the line in that respect.
I like to make phone calls with my phone. I snap pictures with my DSLR.
Most people that I deal with on a day to day basis as the mobile device manager for a medium sized corporation do not give two squirts whether or not their camera is the best out there on their phone…they just want to be able to snap a picture and quickly post it to a social network.
We’re not talking about a $100 Huawei here. Yes you can make do with a subpar camera, but the point of a flagship device is not to make do with mediocre bits.
The only thing anyone could consider subpar about the HTC One camera the megapixel specifications…but most tech guys/gals know that megapixels don’t matter…we’re not snapping photos with our phones to print movie posters with.
Other than that, being able to focus pictures AFTER you’ve taken them, being able to make animated clips/remove entire people/things out of shots, having the best burst shot mode on a camera (less shutter lag than competitors), shooting 1080p video at a higher fps than competitors, and sharing your pics/vids in 3 taps IS something a flagship device should have…most don’t.
Really, people need to stop looking at megapixels and thinking “oh, it’s only 5 so it sucks”. I mean, people thinking this should go buy the 40 megapixel lumia and they can zoom in on their shots over and over til their hearts content. I’m cool with having a crapton of other features that make my shots always come out right no matter what environment I’m taking them in.
Lastly, I can tell you this. Only the iPhone and the HTC One take amazing photos in lowlight situations. I can’t tell you how many times my 1st generation HTC One saved my photo in low light while all my pals couldn’t get the shot (this includes outside and inside shots). I didn’t have to do anything for this to work…and to me, not having to care whether I have low light or not makes the HTC One camera head and shoulders above the rest.
My point is that the HTC One camera may not have the megapixels that marketing people have made everyone think a device needs to be top of the line…but it more than makes up for it in feature, ease of use and turnkey ability.
“The company’s profits and sales continued to fall, and its devices has yet to achieve the popularity held by Samsung’s popular Galaxy line of devices.”
If they want to fix the above, they must fix the below:
“Embedded rechargeable Li-polymer battery”
The market has clearly stated that a removable battery and a SD card slots are what the masses want. Maybe not everyone, but the majority want it.
Sorry HTC, you have an incredible device but I’m buying a Galaxy S5.
Edited 2014-03-25 19:26 UTC
+1
So *that’s* why the iPhone is struggling to shift units these days…
Sorry but the iPhone is a fashion statement FIRST, a phone second. Look at how the “ur holding it wrong” crappy antenna didn’t stop them, the dropping calls didn’t stop them.
There is A REASON why the ONLY other product you see consistent lines for on launch day are sneakers. Its a fashion statement, a way of saying “I am better than you” because if nothing else Steve Jobs was the best marketing guy on the planet since Henry Ford and he sold that “exclusive and expensive” mantra until his last breath. Of course having every cool character in movies and TV using an iDevice doesn’t hurt either.
The masses first want a fast phone that’s user friendly and good looking, has great applications, enough battery life, fine camera, accessories.
When people talk about phones, what they have and what they want or going to get, nobody mentions replaceable batteries or SD cards. Batteries easily last long enough that it makes more sense to buy the latest generation phone than a new battery.
Nobody is going to compromise on the stuff I mentioned in favor of a replaceable battery or SD card slot. If someone does (s)he should buy a feature phone. It has a swappable battery (that lasts for days) and a SD card slot.
These 2 features don’t do anything for the user experience when using the phone. The OS, hardware specs, applications, etc… do.
Yeah those removable batteries are dealbreakers….said no iPhone 5 owner ever.
This phone is, and has always been about the metal. However, according to Engadget:
They also say the GPS is buggy.
Don’t get me wrong… I’m happy they finally have a microSD card slot and a proper do not disturb mode (something EVERY phone should have IMO), but I wish they’d taken the time they spent on the (apparently easily scratched) metal case to find a way to put another 1gb of RAM in there, beef up the battery, and get rid of that f**king HTC One logo bar thingy. And if I can swipe with 3 fingers and get music playing on my Big Jambox, why the hell do I need Boomsound again? And Blinkfeed is arguably as gimmicky as the air gestures on the Galaxy S phones, esp if you’re not that into social media.
Hey HTC, just give me a durable, plastic phone with an extra GB of RAM, a replaceable battery with more juice, a snapdragon 805 (when it comes out), take off the giant speakers and the HTC One logo, and then you’ve got a winner
Edited 2014-03-25 20:29 UTC
But unfortunately, no thanks.
For me personally any phone without a front home button is disqualified. Same goes with phones with on-screen buttons like the nexus, that is just a waste of display space.
4 mp camera, no thanks, i don’t need 40 mp, but i do like the ability to crop the image to compensate for not having zoom.
I like the design, i like the stereo speakers, and i don’t care about not having a replacable battery.
SD card is nice, but akward to use since kitkat, so would rather have much more internal space. They only launch it in my country with 16 gb.
Make the front htc logo a home button, put in a normal camera module, offer it in 32 gb or preferably 64 and i would probably buy it.
And yes, i did notice the double tab to wake it like the LG G2, but at least on the G2 that seems to be quite “moody”
The on-screen buttons uses the same amount of space as if they where part of the bezel. But they can be hidden when playing movies, games etc. So you’re actually gaining space by having on-screen buttons. (Not on the HTC one though).
But they don’t, on a phone like the nexus 5 there appears to be plenty of room for buttons beneath the display.
With the success of the Ponoplayer hi-resolution audio player (14k pre-sold in under 2 weeks)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your…
I wonder if/when a smartphone maker is going to put 24/96 or higher DAC in their phone, and/or a hi-end amplifier stage and dedicated audio components?
Superior HD media specs coming out of a phone (if possible) would make me consider jumping platforms. It’s rumored that Neil Young asked Apple repeatedly to go to higher audio specs in their iPods, and they have continually declined, so he ultimately launched pono to test his theory that people do want HD audio.
I would not be surprised by an Android knockoff of the pono player any day now, and if anyone anywhere moves up their standard audio specs we all win. We have been starving ourselves with crappy audio quality for some time now, and our society is suffering from it.
Edited 2014-03-25 20:41 UTC
We win nothing by going to 24/96. Pornoplayer is mostly a scam.
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Edited 2014-03-25 21:05 UTC
You win nothing believing computer compression programmers over audio professionals and musicians. Xiph.org verse every legendary record producer? I listen to real experts.
Thinking we can’t hear anything more than 16/44 is BS. We hear WAY more than they can measure. Look up timbre and explain to me how digital audio lives without it.
You probably can’t see the extra resolution in your TV or camera, either correct? Of course you can. Guess what — your ears smoke your eyes in regards to sensitivity and spatial awareness.
See the latest story published in journal of science about how olfactory researches just determined that we can actually smell in 100x more detail than what they initially thought. Science is barely scratching the surface on our human senses.
But since we misunderstand our ears and there is so much bad science pushed out by xiph.org (the people who claim there’s no loss in lossy), links like this get posted about and internet people believe them.
There’s all kinds of flaws in their assumptions.
Watch the testimonials from musicians over at ponomusic.com and tell me all those people’s ears are emotions are deceiving them.
no link from monty to programmers at xiph can change that.
audio is analog, digital is just a recreation.
http://wfnk.com/blog/save-the-audio for more thoughts….
Edited 2014-03-26 11:49 UTC
….types the guy surrounded by HD digital screens and HD digital cameras. why the hatred of your hearing? our sense of sound is perhaps our most advanced and nuanced yet we continue to listen to crappy compressed digital audio likes dial-up modems are still around.
you have many false assumptions led by these xiph.org people. what records have they produced? how many recording studios have they been in? where are their grammies?
read and learn, friend — you gain much by not reducing to 16 bits in the first place. the present is already higher bitrate than that. go outside and listen – that’s unlimited resolution.
you also gain much keeping data outside of 20-20k, instead of throwing them away to ship to consumers (as they have been doing for 30 years now).
just because our inner-ear instrumentation doesn’t pick it up when soloed, we can hear it there through masking and other hard to quantify natural phenomena.
look up “timbre”. have xiph.org or anyone telling you about digital audio explain it and show how it’s measured.
here’s a hint – it’s not. they can’t quantify how we can tell the difference between instruments, and they can’t quantify how we can tell the difference between how well that instrument is played. how is it the MOST IMPORTANT part of listening to music, or any sound, is the very thing that science just throws out?
the red-book cd standard is built on half-truths and market-speak science from 1978. mp3 was developed for dial-up modems. both standards are ridiculously outdated and the real snake-oil are the people selling you mp3 or compressed digital in 2014.
Don’t forget about those gold plated $500 cables!
nice dodge leos – but i never mentioned cables! any old cable will do just fine. don’t try to write off everyone who cares about what they hear as a rich audiophile. you don’t need to be a “food-o-phile” to want something better than fast food.
audio pros have a simple rule: garbage in = garbage out.
improving the source quality is always the best and most complete way to improve playback. this is fundamental.
everything between the source and the room is secondary when it comes to improving the sound. also, these days basic amps, cables, and speakers are plenty capable of their duties. it’s the source files that are greatly compromised.
this argument isn’t about frequency range or speakers or cables, it’s about digital resolution.
yet only AUDIO makes computer people swear we don’t need any more resolution, 1978 resolution should be fine.
or another question for you — why don’t you want to hear what they are hearing in the recording studio? you can’t handle the truth ?!?
you couldn’t carry 2″ tape reels and a multitrack deck in your pocket 40 years ago. early iPods 10 years ago would have maxed out at 18 songs in digital HD.
But in october 2014 the pono player will hold 800 HD songs (with 128gb removable cards right around the corner) along with a high-end DAC and amp, so you can take hifi around with digital convenience.
OH By the way — Sony disagrees with you. I’m a crazy random, of course, me and sony.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/25/sony-unveils-bevy-of-walkman-dev…
Edited 2014-03-27 19:03 UTC
Dude its Neil Young…did you even WATCH the Xiph video? Neil still brags about recording on analog 24 track but any musician who knows even a little about music can tell you that analog tape has a lower bandwidth than a $300 AIO recorder thanks to the fact that tape degrades with each pass.
You can go buy some monster cables to hook to your porno player and think you are getting something magical but IRL all you are getting is some extra dead space at best and distortion at worst. Can you hear a dog whistle? If not then having those extra bits is gonna do nothing but waste space and help empty your wallet.
At the end of the day? Math doesn’t lie. the human ear is one of the most well understood organs on the human body, it and sight have been completely mapped out for ages. For you to argue that you can actually hear in the type of ranges we are talking about would be like saying all video that doesn’t provide infrared and ultraviolet is shit.
As someone who has been recording the bands he plays with since the days of 2 inch tape I can tell you Neil is wrong and moreover I can tell you HOW he got it wrong….he listened to some shitty MP3s and low bit AACs and decided that it wasn’t the shitty encoder that must be the trouble, it HAD to be the bitrate. But I bet my last dollar if you had a friend run a blind listening test for you with 16bit 320k MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis and played the 16bit versus say a DVD-Audio at 24/192? I guarantee you you will NOT be able to hear a difference.
Look up “bitrate listening test” if you don’t believe me, plenty have done blind listening tests and placed the results on the net. BTW the above DOES NOT APPLY TO RECORDING where higher sampling rates allow for finer noise reduction and smoother compression effects. THAT is why studios record at high rates NOT because its making the audio magically “fuller”, no matter what Neil says.
Bassbeast – i love your name, we might be on the same team! But you are still missing some of my key points.
It’s not the frequency range, it’s the resolution. Repeat — this is about resolution, not range. 24/44 would sound much better than 16/44, theoretically.
It’s not about dog-whistle highs, it’s about the detail and the depth of the music as it was recorded and mixed. The ADC has to then translate that into a string of digital data. It’s about soundstage, it’s about detail, it’s about balance, precision, clarity, reverbs, rooms, etc. I was there in the early 80’s listening to my first CD and I will never forget my impressions — they took things out. Hard to quantify, but they took things out. Many of us heard it then regardless of what studies the electronics companies could point to.
The real snake-oil here is the term “lossless” since they’ve already lost so much when they went to 16/44. Consumers can have mp3 lossy or CD lossless. Both have lost, it’s a false choice meant to confuse consumers.
There is no reason to strip and compress music down for the consumer anymore. The customer can reduce it’s size further if needed – why sell them an initially degraded product? Red-book was developed for 1978 chips and mp3 was designed for dial-up modems. Why stick to bad standards?
Have you ever had a car stereo where the dial won’t go to the volume you want? How about your smartphone, does the volume go to exactly where you want it, or do you have to pick between two stops, whichever is closer to what you want.
This is a lack of resolution. This is the crux of HD audio — the 24 bit. Sampling 48k or 96k does give you more range and more data, and some can hear that. But I know what I can hear is the lack of resolution. I can pick out almost any mp3 ripped anywhere, at any rate as compared to a “lossless”, if I know the song. Most people can. If you mix music and you can’t you need ear repair. This is in cymbals, hi-hats, stringed instruments, especially voice. Listen to Aretha Franklin, opera, or classical through anything below HD and you should hear obvious limitations and degradations.
Finally — I believe the ear and our sense of hearing is the least understood of our human senses. The fact that any so-called audio scientist simply ignores everything happening outside of the inner ear shows they are clueless. It’s practically junk science, especially the xiph guys, who want it all ways. Mono listening? No loudspeaker? No room? That’s over 50% of what we hear, our environment and how the music interacts in that environment.
[btw Computer programmers are not audio experts – never have been, never will be. Audio is analog and has limitless resolution and this confuses and scares digital programmers. You really do yourself a disservice by listening to any digital programmer over your own ears.]
From the xiph.org website: “While lossy codecs can achieve ratios of 80^aEUR“90+%, they do this at the expense of discarding data from the original stream. Though FLAC uses a similar technique in its encoding process, it also adds ^aEURoeresidual^aEUR data to allow the decoder to restore the original waveform flawlessly. FLAC has become the preferred lossless format for trading live music online. It has a smaller file size than Shorten, and unlike MP3, it^aEURTMs lossless, which ensures the highest fidelity to the source material, which is important to live music traders. It has recently become a favorite trading format of non-live lossless audio traders as well.”
There really are 2 arguments pono is trying to make — first is that we need more resolution to really feel the music, not just recognize it. Since every pro recording studio has been working at 24 bit for over a decade now, and even home producers work at 24 bit these days, that’s kinda obvious.
The second is that mp3’s time has passed for primary listening of music. It is an awesome compression spec for voice, youtube, etc. and will probably last 20 more years. But it never did and never will sound good enough to be the purchased copy of the art.
Just remember man – audio is analog and 16 bits is not enough to store what your ears are capable of and do every day. 16 bit won’t tell you how far apart, how big, or how far something is from you. It won’t tell you the shape of the room it was recorded in. And it generally just throws out timbre.
Final word — look up “timbre” and let it lead you to further understanding of digital audio’s folly’s.
http://wfnk.com/blog/save-the-audio for further discussion…
Edited 2014-03-28 12:27 UTC
Dude…the absolute BEST ANALOG TAPE EVER CREATED was Ampex 8 inch which recorded at a resolution of….drumroll…9-13bits. BTW the 13bits was theoretical and I seriously doubt anybody ever managed to hit that. Oh and don’t forget an analog recording degrades with each play so the absolute best recording master ever made by the time it was mixed was AT BEST around 9 bits. So you are saying that you require 24 bits to capture 9?
And again you are making the mistake of comparing RECORDING to playback and they are as different as light is to sound. When you are recording you NEED that extra resolution so that your noise leveling and compression don’t chop off the highs. The more bits the smoother your compression curve is, once it has been actually mixed? Completely useless as the compression and limiting is already done and in the final product, adding resolution will do nothing but add wasted space.
And yes I am a bass player, both 4 and 5 but lately more 5 as I’ve found playing in a hard rock trio I need the extra low end to “fill in the gaps”. I have played on 3k basses and $300 instruments and have found it all comes down to lucking out into that exact right mix of wood and electronics to get that really sweet tone. My current gear is as follows..
Fender Squire Pro Tone V5 1996 (great bass, Fender quit making these after just 2 years as they were stealing sales from the Fenders, a heavy instrument but it has a hell of a growl), Rogue 5 string (this is the “I don’t give a shit if it gets bashed around” bass,strictly for practice NOT recording), 1990 Fender JP90 (great bass, poplar makes it light and super hot pickups give it real punch), 1983 Washburn 4 string (my “DIY showoff” bass, glitter pickguard with 1940s pinup girl art on the body and dice knobs) and these are going into a Zoom B1X (mainly used for nice clean compression, although I’ve been grooving to the fuzz a little more lately, a really great bass pedal for stage) and my baby, a pre-buyout Trace Elliot 250. You just can’t beat British quality. I have put her up against an Ampeg SVT all tube stack and just smoked it.
This of course doesn’t count all the studio stuff I’ve used, from Alembic fretless to early 70s Magnavox tube guitar amps, if it sounds good I’ll use it. We are working on the first video for the new album, hoping for a mid September release for both and I’ll try to remember to post links in my profile on release.
You are losing me in the first part — how can anyone figure a bit depth of analog tape? bit depth is data space once the audio data has been digitized, there is no bit depth on analog audio tape, at least no figure that i would trust. this is apples and oranges.
if the tape was being used to hold digital data you’d be able to give me a maximum throughput on the read head, sure, but the tape is holding audio data encoded magnetically
i agree with you about recording and playback being different. but digital playback no longer needs to be on a system that is less capable in basic AD/DA as the recording environment was. tracking is different than mixing is different than mastering. i’ve been a part of all of these stages. hopefully the final stage is release to consumer, and for the past couple of decades that standard has been going down in the name of convenience.
if my next recording rig could actually do higher than 24/192 i would try it. if i heard no difference i’d use something else.
my whole point is that producers and musicians have been making this decision for years, and most work at higher than 16/44, and most don’t like the overall sound of their finished product once it’s been reduced to 16/44 and then reduced again to mp3.
this is 2 levels of data loss on the way to the consumer that no longer needs to happen in 2014. if an mp3 is $1 then the full total version can be $2. i will slowly add HD digital to my massive music collection.
as far as your basses — that washburn sounds nice, i kinda like old washburns. you know bootsy played one back in the day!
most fender basses do the trick just right for me, was just playing my buddy’s mustang bass last night. i have an epi/gibson bass thats my beater that sits around to jam on but i have been playing more drums and keys lately.
you gotta sit behind a drumset and hit the cymbal and listen, or smack the snare and listen to all the attack, decay, and layers of sound that can come out of one drum or one cymbal. that’s where i can really hear digital degradation in my music. a simple hi-hat exposes most digital magic.
also on voice, like opera or aretha or sly stone, and also on busy drummers with lots of cymbals like stewart copeland or p-funk. i hear all kinds of artifacts in even hi-rate mp3, and i can tell things are missing at 16/44 compared to higher digital rates.
this does not make me crazy or unusual or wealthy, it just means I try to understand and trust my ears. deprivation is deprivation and i don’t want computers or computer programmers deciding what i don’t need to hear. that’s the artist and producers job.
Edited 2014-03-30 17:28 UTC
You seriously don’t know what bassbeast is talking about there? The dynamic range of best analog tape is so low that 9-13 bits digital medium is enough to reproduce it. Noise floor of analog tape makes it like x-bit digital audio. That’s all you record after going to ever higher bitness, just noise.
BTW, the absolute best AD converters are 20-22 bits – and we’re talking here cryogenically cooled units used in radiotelescopes. Best gear actually used in audio production doesn’t even have 18 real world performance. 24 bits is useful in mastering to avoid rounding errors, that’s all.
Generally, I wonder if you ever did any proper ABX testing…
And it’s not “programmers” who decided 16/44 is enough, but researchers dealing with human hearing.
You use those terms like a true salesman…
the “science” behind xiph.org and most digital audio is the real scam. learn to identify real experts and ignore the wannabes trying to convince you that something less is more.
they have been lying to us, depriving us of our true music, for many years now.
you can continue to accept sad, flat, xerox copies of real music at your own risk. everyone benefits from better sound.
Edited 2014-03-26 23:07 UTC
It is far more likely that ~musicians simply don’t understand sampling theorem, and digital audio in general. And BTW, the science which led to (yes, in that order) 16/44 is the same as the one behind 24/96 (which can be very useful for editing, but that’s all) – if you disregard one, you also claim the second is flawed.
Anyway, crappy audio quality nowadays is due to loudness war, and that won’t go away with the move to “HD” audio… (actually, a form of loudness war was already present on vinyl)
Time and time again, during blind ABX listening tests, the “golden ears” are unable to tell the difference between SACD or DVD-Audio and Red Book CD. That’s also largely because ~musicians are people with among the highest incidence of hearing damage.
As always, in terms of phone design, HTC always excels.
It’s a little disappointing that the new One has reduced the size of internal storage. With my HTC One and 32GB storage built-in, I do not really need to think about the microSD, let alone those “App2SD” or management of partitions. As a developer I also hate it when I need to think about all the combination of internal and external storage, and the non-standardized representation of the SDCard partition. So I would rather have a large onboard storage than a small one with an external microSD.
Of course I do not complain if I can get a phone with large internal storage AND microSD, though I would probably use microSD just for multimedia storage.
The depth sensor is nice. It would be great if developers can use it to create some apps.
search for the new line of 35th anniversary walkman products from Sony: all are pushing HD digital. it runs android, has pro-level specs, and does audio only.
http://www.head-fi.org/t/680853/sony-nwz-zx1-35th-walkman-anniversa…
if it’s snake oil, it’s sony walkman snake oil.
also note that the walkman is currently only announced for japan and should cost around $800 US, and will be a fixed 64gb memory.
compare to the US-designed and sold Pono, with 64gb on-board + a cardslot for limitless storage, selling for $400.
also, don’t forget content — pono store will stock the highest quality masters they can get, and have promised to give you free upgrades if better masters become available. sony is still avoiding actually selling much HD content.