HTC One vs Samsung Galaxy S3

The HTC One is the latest flagship ‘hero’ phone from the Taiwanese manufacturer and it’s something of a monster with a sharp 4.7-inch display, a contoured anodised aluminium unibody and a brand new Qualcomm quad-core processor.

It’s going up against Samsung’s well established Galaxy S3, which packs Samsung’s own Exynos quad-core chip and a similarly sized Super AMOLED touchscreen.

HTC One: Key specs and what’s hot

The elements of the HTC One which are a ‘big deal’ include the design, build quality, display and processing power.

Design-wise it has kept enough of what made earlier HTC One range models looking good and feeling premium in the hand. In fact, it’s built on this further with the use of anodised aluminium in place of polycarbonate, but the finish is still matte, which we really like.

The back panel and corners have a slight curvature to soften things, though overall it’s quite an angular device, particularly when viewed from the front, and reminds us of HTC’s 8X Windows Phone flagship.

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The volume rocker and other solid buttons have a brushed texture which looks premium and the phone sports a narrow bezel on either side of the display while the top and bottom are capped by the unibody wrapping around from the back.

The display is a 4.7-inch Super LCD3 with a 1920x1080 pixel Full HD resolution at 468 pixels-per-inch (ppi), meaning it produces razor sharp visuals along with really punchy colours and decent brightness. Viewing films, games, webpages and multimedia on this screen is pretty incredible.

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor sits inside the HTC One clocked at 1.7GHz and boasting 2GB of dual-channel RAM along with an Adreno 320 graphics processing unit (GPU).

As you can imagine, this delivers some high-end performance for whatever smartphone tasks you care to undertake.

While the HTC One lacks microSD capability it does have a higher-end internal storage option with both 32GB and 64GB models available.

Samsung Galaxy S3: Key specs and what’s hot

Samsung’s Galaxy S3 remains a highly competitive handset. It’s got a powerful quad-core Exynos 4412 processor clocked at 1.4GHz with 1GB of RAM and a Mali-400MP quad-core GPU.

There isn’t much currently on Google Play that this can’t handle and it runs your day-to-day Android experience very smoothly indeed.

The Galaxy S3 has 16GB and 32GB storage options, there used to be a 64GB model but this has been discontinued. All variant have an advantage over the HTC One because they include microSD storage for high-capacity cards up to 64GB.

Direct spec comparison: Shootout