In today’s smartphone world, there is a maxim that no matter how powerful or capable a certain handset is, there will always be bugs and issues that will hamper its performance. This seems to be the case with the HTC One, the current flagship device of the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer.
There is no denying that the HTC One is a beautifully-designed piece of hardware and given its flagship status, the handset is fashioned from premium materials that not only give it a solid build quality but at the same time give it an elegant and classy air. In addition to that, the HTC One packs fire-breathing components under its hood that enable it to take care of any task, even multiple ones at that, that you throw at it with relative ease.
However, there seem to be an issue that adversely affects the user experience brought about by the handset – an issue that could be a deal breaker for some of our smartphone-crazed brethren. Apparently, the Home and Back virtual capacitive buttons of HTC One is plagued with a sensitivity issue that gives users difficulties in achieving the desired results when pressing on the said buttons.
As it stands, users of the handset observed an inconsistency in the detection of button presses on these capacitive buttons. The symptoms appear to be intermittent and irregular and other users are reporting that the detection area of the Home and Back buttons of the HTC One is too small and you have to be very accurate on pressing on the areas for the button press to be detected and get the desired results. In most cases, users experience repeatedly pressing on the buttons but the HTC One remains unresponsive at times.
A thread at the XDA Devs forums is dedicated on this issue with the HTC One and some users are chiming in that even the Sprint variant of the handset is also affected by this issue. Furthermore, customer service representatives from Sprint retails stores confirm that this is already a known issue but a fix is already in the works to get this taken care of.
In fact, HTC is now rolling out the 1.29.xxx.12 update to HTC One handsets in Europe and Asia but sad to say, users of the carrier-branded HTC One handsets in US shores still have to wait for the go-signal from their respective carriers before this particular update that will get rid of the issue with the handset’s capacitive buttons could hit the airwaves.
Despite that issue, nothing can change the fact that the HTC One is one powerful handset. It has a QualComm APQ8064T SnapDragon chipset under the hood which gives the device a quad-core 1.7 GHz Krait 300 processor and a staggering 2GB of RAM for a flawless performance all the time. The handset can be had in a 16GB and a 32GB variant in terms of storage space while its display is a 4.7-inch SuperLCD3 panel made from Gorilla Glass 2 and has 1920 x 1080 resolution. Its camera department is just as impressive with its rear 4MP UltraPixel shooter and a front 2.1MP video call and self-portrait snapper.
May 3, 2013 at 9:19 am
Yup – I’ve got the issue. Sprint HTC One. It is super frustrating. It’s very intermittent: sometimes it works just fine and sometimes it takes several presses. The back button seems to be the worse, as sometimes I have to use the home button to go all the way back to the home screen.
What makes it worse is when there is the settings menu at the bottom of the app. In this case the settings menu many times pops up instead of the back button functionality no matter where you press around the back button. I’m 85% on my way to returning the One for the S4. Sprint and HTC need to do something soon.
May 3, 2013 at 12:17 pm
The HTC One is sold in 32GB and 64GB variants, not 16 and 32 as is stated in the article.
May 3, 2013 at 3:07 pm
I’ve been having this issue as well. While far from a deal breaker it is a little annoying.