Every few months ¡ª a year at most ¡ª we see a feature or spec introduced on a phone that represents a new standard, a baseline that future phones in the high end have no option but to match. If you go back a few years, you can build a list: the front-facing camera, the gigahertz processor, HD video capture, the WVGA display, the dual-core processor ¡ª all line items that set a new bar. They're not always important line items, of course ¡ª we could do without front-facing cameras, I suspect ¡ª but regardless, these kinds of things force manufacturers to up their games and move forward.
Today, that must-have feature is now the 720p display. It wasn't more than a year ago that WVGA resolution was perfectly acceptable on a $200-plus smartphone, and qHD had just barely started to replace it over the course of 2011 when Samsung, LG, and HTC all decided that it was time to go straight to an actual high-definition screen. It's pretty remarkable to think that you've got close to a million pixels on a display that measures under 5 inches across.
HTC's Rezound for Verizon is the very first of an onslaught of 720p phones to hit the US market. As you might expect, its price ($299) and the remainder of its long spec sheet are just as hefty as the display: 16GB of storage, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p capture, and naturally, LTE. The company is quick to point out that this is HTC's first Beats Audio device to hit the US, too, so let's find out whether this beast is as good as its feature list would have you believe. Q228(E77)e
Hardware / design
From the box alone, you'd have no idea what you're holding. Verizon's smartphone marketing strategy is a fascinating case study: the boxes for its Droid models tend to be loud, in-your-face packages with a glowing red eye featured prominently somewhere, but the Rezound ¡ª which isn't branded as a Droid device, for some reason ¡ª comes in a completely black box with nothing more than a subtle "HTC" embossed at one end. That's it. No Rezound logo, no picture of the phone. Calling it understated is, well, an understatement.
When you remove the outer sleeve and flip open the box, you'll find the Rezound placed between the included Beats Audio earbuds, one bud on either side. This part of the packaging is all black, too, which really makes the red wires of the headset pop out at you ¡ª and that's likely the intended effect. It's clear that HTC really believes that its Beats partnership is a big deal, and in the consumer audio business, those red wires have become iconic to a level that's exceeded only by the classic iPod white. If you've read some of my other reviews, you'll know that I'm generally not a fan of headsets included with phones ¡ª they're rarely good enough to do your music justice ¡ª but Beats Audio may be an exception. More on that a little later.
Display
We can wax philosophical about the Rezound's LTE radio, 1.5GHz processor, and Beats Audio until we're blue in the face, but really, all eyes are fixated on one feature alone: the 4.3-inch 720p LCD. It's the first phone to launch with a true high-def display in the US, and I think it goes without saying that people want to know whether it's a marked improvement over the crop of qHD devices that have come to market over the past few months.
In a word: yes. You want this screen ¡ª or something very much like it ¡ª in your next smartphone. At a rather absurdly high 342ppi, the Rezound shares the iPhone's unique ability to make individual pixels all but disappear to the naked eye ¡ª but it does so at a higher resolution and a much larger size than the iPhone does. W995 Unlocked Cell Phone
Going into this review, I'd assumed that HTC would've had to use the much-maligned PenTile subpixel arrangement in order to hit such a high resolution at this size, but it turns out the Rezound uses a traditional RGB configuration. None of the usual PenTile complaints ¡ª poor text rendering, a "checkerboard" pattern around edges, strange tint, and an inability to correctly render shades of gray, for instance ¡ª are present here. Compared to the PenTile qHD displays in phones lie the Droid Bionic and Droid RAZR, the Rezound runs circles around them, both for clarity and accuracy.
Outdoor viewability is quite good, though I was able to get the screen to wash out in bright, direct sunlight (solution: put a hand over the screen). I was also able to get colors to fade by holding the phone at odd viewing angles, but none that would affect normal day-to-day use. Looking at it straight-on, I found contrast, brightness, and color temperature to be near perfect, or at least good enough for my imperfect eyes. It's very difficult to find fault with this display ¡ª and if you do find fault, it's because you're specifically looking for it, not because you're running into limitations in the course of using the phone normally.
Performance / battery life
Beats Audio
In light of the Beats branding, let's start with the elephant in the room: audio performance. HTC has been talking an extraordinarily big game around the value that its Beats Audio partnership brings to the table with the Rezound and other products ¡ª so I had to find out of the included earbuds are any good. I should point out that these aren't the high-end Beats by Dr. Dre Tour model ¡ª easily identified by the flat ribbon cables coming out of the buds ¡ª rather, they appear to be pitch-perfect copies of the company's $100 iBeats. They fit in my ears quite well, were comfortable to wear at length, and can be customized to your ears with the included pack of replacement buds.
Battery life
The Rezound has a 1,620mAh battery, which is a little lower than I expected considering the 13.7mm shell ¡ª I guess that thickness is more on account of the 720p LCD and circuitry, not a giant power pack. I had two distinctly different experiences in the course of testing it: my torturous maximum drain test yielded just one hour and 52 minutes, in which I used LTE to stream NFL Mobile nonstop at full volume (and allowed the phone to get quite warm in the process. On the flip side, though, I found that I was more than able to make it through a full day of "regular" use including a fair amount of LTE-driven web browsing and email management and a half-hour phone call. In other words, my initial impression here is that you won't need to worry about it as long as you can plug in every night and recharge, but there might be some days ¡ª when you're streaming a ton of video or using the Mobile Hotspot feature, for instance ¡ª where your luck is going to run out. 3GS Cell Phone
Wrap-up
The Rezound will likely go down as one of the best Android phones ever to launch pre-Ice Cream Sandwich ¡ª its incredible display, in harmony with the LTE modem and beefy processor, is simply too great to ignore. But I couldn't help shake the feeling that this phone could be so much better if it had shipped without Sense, or ¡ª at the very least ¡ª a significantly stripped down version of it, the same way other manufacturers have put their skins on a diet as of late.