HTC 10 evo review: The sea dragon

Gallery

Google Photos is a top notch gallery and we're okay with it being the only gallery app on the phone. It can sync photos to the cloud so you never lose them, the image recognition and search are unsurpassed and the interface is fast and intuitive.

Google Photos is available on most Android phones

Editing tools offers image styles as well as extensive manual controls. There is a RAW Enhancement option too, but that's fully automatic (we would have preferred manual controls for RAW).

Zoe lives on even without the HTC gallery. It allows you to quickly create Highlight videos. Just select a number of photos and videos and pick a theme and music. The Smart trim option makes sure the video won't run too long, by clipping long videos down to 3 seconds.

Creating a Highlight video with Zoe

There's no dedicated video player, by the way, you start videos from Photos. That's good enough for clips you shot yourself, but with no subtitle support and other options it is not the best for watching videos.

Music player

Google Play Music takes care of your listening needs. Google would want you to pay into their streaming service, but the app is a perfectly capable offline music player too.

No custom music app either, just Google Play Music

You may want to try out the HTC BoomSound Adaptive Audio feature. After all, that's the major reason HTC cites for cutting the analog headphone jack. The headphones that come with the HTC 10 evo are able to work as sensors, scanning the inner shape of your ears and optimizing the sound.

You have to go into the settings to create an audio profile, it takes less than a minute. You can create several profiles, in case you share the phone with others or have several pairs of supported headphones.

The process of creating a personalized audio profile takes seconds

The HTC 10 evo is Hi-Res audio certified and supports FLAC - the most popular lossless audio format out there.

Audio quality

In case you missed it - we couldn't do the audio quality test because we didn't have a USB-C to headphone jack adapter. Previous phones without headphone jacks (we've tested several) came with their own adapters. Not the HTC 10 evo, though. Was it really worth it to save a few cents, HTC?

Getting a good quality adapter will cost you a few bucks, but more importantly we don't like to feel like we're being nickeled and dimed, not when paying €400+ for a phone.