HTC One SV vs Nexus 4

We see how HTC's One SV smartphone compares to Google's Nexus 4 flagship.

Form

Nexus 4 - 133.9x68.7x9.1mm, 139g

HTC One SV - 128x66.9x9.2mm, 122g

The Nexus 4 follows on in the footsteps of the rest of Google's 'comissioned' Nexus family and as a result the overall design ethos is broadly the same.

The Nexus 4 lacks the concave back panel, textured finish and curved glass display of Samsung's take on the Nexus phone brand. But it's still very much a Nexus handset in the looks department. Instead we have a much stockier handset in terms of proportion, with a very narrow bezel.

But so far it's fairly dull. A distinctive and somewhat more vibrant feature is the glass back panel with a glittery texture underneath.

We can't say we like this even though it's the jazziest thing about the device, not only is it unsightly in and of itself but the contrast between the rest of the fairly boring design and this disco-fever back panel is jarring and bizarre to say the very least.

We can't argue with the build quality, however, which appears to be top notch.

HTC's One SV is much more pleasing to the eye with the company focusing on the features reviewers and users liked from its other One range models.

It doesn't have a unibody but instead there's a very flush fitting concave back panel with a matte finish and the corners are heavily curved too.

The phone sits comfortably in the hand and build quality feels great.

Winner - HTC One SV

Display

The One SV has the smaller display of these two handsets at 4.3-inches. It's a Super LCD2 touchscreen with an 800x480 pixel resolution at 217 pixels- per-inch (ppi). Corning Gorilla Glass has been used for some extra durability.

Like HTC's other SLCD2 equipped handsets you can expect sharp and colourful picture quality, good brightness and decent contrast.

Google's Nexus 4 has a larger 4.7-inch IPS+ LCD touchscreen with a True HD 1280x768 pixel resolution, giving a pixel density of 318ppi.

In terms of colour depth, contrast and brightness there's not a huge difference here but the extra 100ppi is very noticably sharper.

Winner - Nexus 4

Storage

The Nexus 4 comes in both 8GB and 16GB internal storage variants but neither option has microSD capability.

Conversely, the One SV has only 8GB onboard but will accept microSD cards up to 32GB.

Ultimately you get more storage on the One SV, but sometimes onboard is preferable to cards. It's tricky one to call as we often find 16GB is plenty, but think we'd struggle with only 8GB, so it's just as well the HTC is expandable.

Winner - Draw