After the HTC One M8 and the HTC One M9, HTC is dropping the "One M" branding and just calling this device the "HTC 10." The new naming scheme is apt. The phone has slimmed down by cutting out a lot of extras that really didn't need to be there in the first place, and the front of the device has been greatly compacted and simplified. HTC's trademark massive speaker grills are gone, and the "HTC Bar"—an area of bezel dead space that housed only the HTC logo—is gone, too. These two changes let HTC significantly sink the vertical bezels on this device, resulting in a 5.1-inch phone that isn't ridiculously tall like past models were.

The theme of "addition by subtraction" continues in the rest of the phone. With the HTC 10, HTC seems intent on stripping its designs of the last four years down to the bare necessities, righting the wrongs of the previous version. The One M9 had a weird ridge that ran along the perimeter of the phone, almost like the front and back of the phone were two halves of a shell that didn't fit together. This is fixed in the 10, which looks smooth and uniform. The One M9 had a metal body but used a glossy coating that took away from the premium feel of the metal. The HTC 10 feels more like bare aluminum.

With the speaker grills gone, HTC has also done away with the exposed plastic covers that were on the top and bottom of the One M9. The whole front of the device is now covered in glass, which butts right up against the chamfered metal edge of the case. There are still two speakers on the HTC 10—one is a front-facing speaker that sits in the reasonably sized earpiece cutout on the top of the glass, and the other is a bottom-firing speaker next to the USB Type C port. These two speakers are easily the best of any 2016 flagship. They provide a ton of sound at high quality while not wasting the crazy amount of space that they did on past HTC phones. We still wouldn't want to use them to listen to music or anything, but for the occasional game audio or cat video, they're great.

Next to the earpiece is a massive front-facing camera. The large cutout makes way for what HTC says is the "first ever" smartphone with optical image stabilization on the front of the device. While HTC has shipped front-facing cameras with sensors that go as high as 13MP, this is only a more pedestrian 5MP sensor.

For the buttons, HTC went with a Samsung-y hardware home button/fingerprint reader with capacitive back and recent buttons on either side. The fingerprint sensor seems to be the same thing everyone else is using—a fast, accurate touch sensor that is just as good as the iPhone's Touch ID. Usually an implementation like this will go with a clicky home button, but here it's a stationary capacitive button