The 24kt gold HTC One you'll never own
The smartphone world has seen more than its fair share of gold smartphones this year, but it looks like HTC is going to make a couple of them anyhow.
Would you want a phone that was actually made of gold? Let me rephrase that - would you actually want to use a phone that was made of gold in your everyday life?
Unlike the champagne iPhone 5S and the rose gold colored Samsung Galaxy S4, the HTC One is plated in actual 24kt gold. Compelled by sheer curiosity, we sat down with one recently to see whether or not this can actually be used as a phone.
The big obvious thing you notice first is the color. There's no other way to describe this device than ostentatious, but HTC actually did a decent job accenting the design in black as long as you don't spend a whole lot of time looking at the back of the phone. The front of the phone looks pretty good, but once you flip it over things start to slide downhill.
Because it is a soft metal, the gold HTC One we spent time with had already been scuffed up a little on the back. To add to this, the back of the phone is now an enormous fingerprint magnet since the it is glossy. It's slippery in an almost plastic way if you try to hold the phone by just letting it rest on your fingers like you could the original One. Physically the phone is the same shape and size, with the same pleasing curves and hard lines to make it feel nice if you've got a grip on it.
Each HTC One takes 200 minutes to manufacture, including the gold version according to HTC. The plating isn't expected to interfere with the radio in any way, but the model we used didn't have a SIM card in it so there was no way to test that ourselves. Given the design of the HTC One, it seems very unlikely that the gold would interfere with the radios. In actually using the phone, the experience was the same as any other HTC One.
HTC is making this special gold One available as part of a contest they are holding in New York City. The phones are valued at $2,500, so if you manage to win one it'll be up to you to decide whether or not this is something you'd carry around in your pocket. Even if you put a case on it, the back of this phone seems really likely to be damaged by sand or dust that would get in between the case and the handset anyway.
