HTC U11 review: outdated design, but solid performance, good battery life, Edge Sense works well and is convenient
Improving on the HTC 10 where it matters, even if it sports a flashy, outdated design. — HTC introduced the “U” smartphone line back in January with the U Ultra and U Play handsets …
Context & Ripple Effects
The U11 is HTC's course-correction after a rough stretch: the One M9 was dragged down by a throttled, hot-running Snapdragon 810, and the [[a:917361|U Ultra launched months earlier with below-average battery life, no headphone jack, and a high price]]. Ars Technica's verdict here — performance and battery fixed, design left flashy but stale — reads as HTC addressing exactly those two failures on the flagship it actually expects to sell.
The other notable piece is Edge Sense, squeeze-sensitive sides that give HTC a feature competitors don't copy easily. That bet gets doubled down on later: the U11 Plus follows in November with a bigger 3,930mAh battery and IP68 rating, and by the U12 Plus in 2018 the pressure-sensitive idea has spread to solid-state buttons — where reviewers pan it.
First-order effects
- Flagship buyers choosing between HTC's own U Ultra and U11 now have a clear answer on the two axes that sank earlier models — battery life and price-to-performance — leaving design taste as the deciding factor.
- Edge Sense gives HTC a differentiated interaction model at a moment when its hardware specs alone weren't separating the U line from rivals.
Second-order effects
- The U11's reception sets up the U11 Plus as the refinement play — larger battery, water resistance, Alexa plus Google Assistant — but HTC ships it to Europe only, signaling where it thinks demand actually sits.
- Pressure-sensitive sides prove sticky enough that HTC extends the concept to buttons on the U12+, turning a well-reviewed convenience into a design liability when reviewers call the solid-state buttons a disaster.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across M9, U Ultra, U11, and U12+ is a company iterating hardware fixes one generation behind its own mistakes — a cadence that coincides, per the broader coverage, with HTC naming a new CEO from outside and leaning harder into Vive headsets rather than phones.
- If squeeze/pressure input keeps migrating across the lineup, HTC's differentiation strategy becomes software-and-interaction features rather than spec leadership — a narrower moat that depends on each generation executing better than the last.
The trend: HTC's smartphone line is caught between fixing last year's flaws and searching for interaction-based differentiation, even as the company's center of gravity shifts toward VR hardware.