Sprint's HTC One is stunning, fast, and feature packed

Hi. This is Brian Bennett for CNET.com and right now, we're taking a first look at the HTC One smartphone for Sprint. This 32-gigabyte version will be sold by Sprint beginning April 19th for $199.99. Now, a lot of people have been waiting for the HTC One to start hitting U.S. carriers. Honestly, I can understand why. This handset is down right gorgeous. Its chassis is carved from a single piece of aluminum using what HTC calls a zero gap construction method. The phone is available in use of both black and a silver model like you see here. Measuring just 0.37 inch thick, the one is extremely think. Tipping the scales at 5.1 ounces, the device light too, considering its metal built materials. A big bright 4.7-inch LCD screen offers a sharps 1080p resolution and a pixel density of 468 PPI. That's more than both the Droid DNA and Samsung Galaxing S4. Above the display sits a 2.1 megapixel front-facing camera and notification light. Below are just 2 capacitive Android buttons. Two massive speakers sit on either side of the screen, which enable what HTC calls Boom Sound. Really a flamboyant phrase describing the one stereo sound plus that it produces a lot more volume than typical phone speakers. What's really interesting is how the power button also doubles as an IR blaster to control home theater equipment. A volume rocker is placed on the right side, while a SIM card slot holds court on the left. On the bottom edge sits the phone's micro USB port. Around back is the 4 megapixel main camera and LED flash, which also uses HTC's Ultra Pixel sensor. Positively packed with advance software components and features, the HTC One runs Android Jelly Bean with the company's latest iteration of Sense UI on top of it. What's really new here, though, is the BlinkFeed Feature which acts similarly to Flipboard and other news aggregators to pull in updates from a curated group of sources. You can push BlinkFeed to the side and use another more traditional home screen as your main default view. You can however get rid of BlinkFeed completely. BlinkFeed also chose the weather and time plus slick animations to indicate current weather conditions. All of this is powered by a 1.7 GHz quad core Snapdragon 600 processor, backed up by 2 gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of internal storage. One bummer is that the phone lacks an SD card slot for memory expansion and its battery is embedded. At first glance, this is the most beautiful smartphone I've held in my hands. Hopefully it will also deliver on performance, feature and usability. I'm Brian Bennett for CNET.com and this has been a first look at the Spring HTC One. Be sure to check back soon for a full review.