HTC'S SQUISHY NEW PHONE HAS ALL THE THINGS—EVEN ALEXA
IMAGINE YOU'RE HTC. You were once atop the smartphone heap, making some of the best-designed and most impressive Android devices on the planet. Life was so exciting! Then everyone else kept improving, and you didn't. Samsung, and Apple, and Xiaomi, and Oppo, and, well, just about everybody passed you by. You're trying to get back into the game. What do do you? If you answered "throw a hundred ideas into a single phone and see what happens," congratulations! You just joined HTC's product team. The company's new phone, the U11, sounds like a youth soccer league but is absolutely loaded to the brim with interesting new tech and ideas. There's Edge Sense, an entirely new interface that lets you gently squeeze the sides of your phone to take a selfie, dictate a text, or open an app—like 3D Touch, only on the sides of the phone instead of the screen. There's also a new design language HTC calls "Liquid Surface," a super-refractive (and ...