Freshly Squeezed For Your Pleasure

FOR Solid build; stunning screen; fast performance

AGAINST No headphone jack; music could be more engaging

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In a market as competitive as smartphones, manufacturers have long been searching for ways to stand out. But a ‘squeezable’ phone? That's a new one on us.

The U11 feels familiar. For a start, it’s got bezels, and the 5.5in screen uses the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, so there are no design rulebooks being rewritten here.

Lovely polish

That’s not to say it’s lacking in flourishes. HTC has ditched the metal it has embraced since the days of the HTC One and instead uses glass and a process it calls Liquid Surface. This bakes layers of colour into the glass itself, so it looks different depending on the angle you view it from. It’s a chrome finish, so a fingerprint nightmare, but when polished looks very nice indeed.

There are five colours to choose from – black, white, blue, silver and red. Our silver sample can look ice blue in the right light.

HTC has largely stuck to what it knows when it comes to the rest of the design. The home button doubles as a snappy fingerprint scanner; the lock button and volume rocker sit on the right-hand side. But it’s the metal frame around the middle that holds the key to the U11’s squeezy credentials – something HTC calls ‘Edge Sense’.

It contains touch-sensitive panels built into the lower half of the phone, so it’s able to tell when you apply pressure to the sides. You can set how hard you have to squeeze for it to register, but even on the lowest setting, you have to make a definite squeeze motion – it’s not something you could activate by mistake.

The idea is that you can use it as a shortcut to access functions. The default is to launch the camera. Once in the camera, squeeze again to take a photo. It’s a good idea in principle, but we find the shots are often out of focus because of the shake that occurs when you squeeze.