HTC has this morning announced its new flagship handset, the HTC U11 – and for reasons we may never truly understand, it's the world's first squeezable smartphone.
While all phones are technically squeezable, the HTC U11 is the first handset to actually do something when you squeeze it. Called 'Edge Sense', it's touted by the Taiwanese manufacturer as the next frontier in human-computer interaction. The lower half of the phone's frame is rigid but pressure-sensitive, so by gently squeezing it you can do things like activate the camera from the lock screen. In camera mode, squeezing will trigger the shutter to snap a picture or a selfie. Squeeze and hold and you'll activate Google Assistant without having to utter the "okay Google" wake-up phrase.
You can remap the squeeze to perform pretty much any function on the phone, meaning that it is, for all intents and purposes, another button in disguise. Except it's not as good as a button, because it doesn't click, has no give, is incompatible with certain types of cases, and is otherwise likely to be accidentally triggered inside pockets and bags. Regular buttons – the well-established, foolproof method of detecting a squeeze – also adorn the frame of the phone.
This is a gimmick straight out of HTC's department of "oh god we need something, anything to make our phone stand out", and is so heinously ridiculous that it threatens to overshadow what is otherwise a very good Android phone.
It's the first handset to incorporate both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa into a single device (just ask for the virtual assistant you prefer), and it follows the hyper-glossy design principles set by the recent HTC U Ultra (which also sported a gimmick in the form of its dedicated notifications screen).
The U11 is waterproof and works while wet, and although it's missing a 3.5mm headphone jack, the supplied USB Type-C converter sports a built-in DAC that continues HTC's laudable practice of coupling its phones with top-spec audio hardware.
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