HTC’s Squishy New Phone Has All The Things—Even Alexa

Imagine you’re HTC. You were once atop the smartphone heap, making some of the best-designed and most impressive Android devices on the planet. Life was so exciting! Then everyone else kept improving, and you didn’t. Samsung, and Apple, and Xiaomi, and Oppo, and, well, just about everybody passed you by. You’re trying to get back into the game. What do do you?

If you answered “throw a hundred ideas into a single phone and see what happens,” congratulations! You just joined HTC’s product team. The company’s new phone, the U11, sounds like a youth soccer league but is absolutely loaded to the brim with interesting new tech and ideas. There’s Edge Sense, an entirely new interface that lets you gently squeeze the sides of your phone to take a selfie, dictate a text, or open an app—like 3D Touch, only on the sides of the phone instead of the screen. There’s also a new design language HTC calls “Liquid Surface,” a super-refractive (and by the looks of it, super-reflective) glass manufacturing process that makes the phone glisten in the light. HTC’s even touting its audio prowess, which it calls USonic, and incorporates into a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that come with the new phone.

The U11’s most awesome feature is its Alexa integration. It works hands-free, so you don’t have to unlock the phone to use Alexa—and you get all the same stuff you’d get on an Echo. If the Fire Phone had survived, this is how Amazon would have integrated its virtual assistant. Since it’s an Android phone, the U11 also has Google Assistant; you decide which you want to talk to at any given time. And since it’s an HTC phone, there’s a whole other assistant too! The Sense Companion keeps your phone running smoothly, reminds you to leave for work on time, helps with fitness goals, and the like. You could argue three assistants is too many, but we’d say there’s no such thing. Though we’d also like to humbly request a “Hey y’all” wake word to speak to all three assistants at once. And have questions about whether the assistants know of each other, and may get jealous over time. But we digress.

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Not interested in lovingly squeezing your phone or chatting with the peanut gallery inside, and just want some super-duper hardware specs? HTC’s got you. The U11 has a 5.5-inch, 2560×1440 screen, and runs Qualcomm’s brand-spankin’-new Snapdragon 835 processor, along with 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage. Its new 12-megapixel camera has wide aperture and fast autofocus, and apparently received the highest score ever from DxO Labs, an independent image-quality tester. (The previous winner was the Google Pixel, which has a truly fantastic camera.) Fingerprint reader: check. Waterproof: check. Sprint exclusive: sadly, check.

The Edge Sense stuff is HTC’s biggest swing here, as the company grasps for a genuinely new and useful way to use your smartphone. It sounds clever, actually, but it’s hard to imagine many developers building for one feature on one Android device, which means phone-squeezing is probably forever just a shortcut button. Luckily, the U11 seems to have plenty of other stuff going for it. The phone’s available for pre-order now, starting at $649 unlocked or $29 a month on your Sprint bill. It comes in blue, black, and silver, all of which look good.

Is it enough to make HTC cool again? We’ll have to see how good those photos really are. And how much we like talking to Alexa on the go. But at first glance, the kitchen-sink approach seems like the right one.

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