HTC First With Facebook Home Review

You’ll find a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera on the HTC First. The lens on this camera supports an aperture of f/2.0. There’s a small LED flash to the right of the lens. The software that accompanies the camera is pretty basic, offering five scene modes (Auto, Action, Night, Sunset, and Party) along with flash controls and the ability to adjust the exposure and white balance.

Images taken with the First’s camera were usable, however they were not as good as many camera phones we’ve used in the past. Many of our images seemed flat and dull. For a phone that has such tight integration with Facebook for social networking, we would have liked to see a better camera on this phone.

HTC First Battery Life

You’ll find a 2000 mAh Li-polymer battery in the HTC First. As mentioned earlier, this battery is not removable. AT&T claims you should get up to 14.3 hours talk time or up to 18.2 days standby time from the First’s battery.

In an attempt to quantitatively measure the HTC First's battery life in a controlled benchmark environment, we ran a test in which we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics, Flash media and text. The page automatically refreshes every three minutes, we loop the page and also setup a screen lock utility that keeps the display from sleeping during the test.  Battery life is measured down to the minute the smartphone shuts down.  The Wi-Fi radio is enabled in this test to simulate battery life in real-world web browsing over a wireless connection.

For this test, we set the HTC First's display to 50% brightness, which is still plenty bright and easy on the eyes. The HTC First lasted 9 hours and 20 minutes untethered before it powered down, providing one of the longest lasting phones we have in our charts.

Note: this review has been updated to reflect more accurate battery test numbers.