Engadget: The HTC Droid DNA sports a 5-inch 1920×1080 Super LCD 3 good for a res­o­lu­tion of 440 ppi. This is state of the art. I believe 440 ppi is high­est in the world among ship­ping prod­ucts, shared only by the HTC J Butterfuly. The rear cam­era fea­tures a 28mm f/2.0 lens mated to an 8 megapixel BSI image sensor.

Cramming 1920×1080 pix­els into a 5-inch diag­o­nal LCD is one thing, but to make sure that con­tent looks fan­tas­tic is some­thing else. Let’s hope HTC did the right thing by incor­po­rat­ing in-cell touch, opti­cally lam­i­nat­ing the LCD to the cover glass, used a com­bi­na­tion of color fil­ters and match­ing LEDs for a 100% sRGB color gamut, and tuned those col­ors for accu­racy. Of course view­ing angles, color/brightness shifts, con­trast, reflectance, reflec­tions, etc. all should be top notch as well.

The HTC Droid DNA, run­ning Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, will run on Verizon’s LTE net­work, and launch on November 21 for a rea­son­able US$199 with a two-year contract.

Update 2012.11.16: Dan Seifert, The Verge:

[...] I’m not a fan of the place­ment of the but­ton on the One X — but the loca­tion of the Droid DNA’s is a new low. Or a new high, if you will, since it’s located in the mid­dle of the top edge of the phone, which might be the most awk­ward place it could be on a phone of this size. There is no easy way to press the but­ton with­out shift­ing the phone in your hand and assum­ing a ridicu­lous claw grip with your index fin­ger on top of the device. Somebody really needs to tell HTC’s design­ers that power but­tons work best on the side when phones have 4.3-inch or larger displays.

I’m not a fan of the place­ment of the power but­ton on the iPhone, all iPhones. Why is it placed to the right? To me it seems Apple design­ers designed the loca­tion of the power but­ton for right-handed folks. Right-handed folks—I’m one of them—hold the iPhone with the left hand and do all the pok­ing and pinch­ing with the right. Well I don’t care for this type of design, and laud HTC for putting the power but­ton where it belongs: in the mid­dle. Whether you’re right-handed or left-handed the expe­ri­ence of push­ing the power but­ton is the same, and that’s a good thing. You can’t do that with every­thing (well, you can actu­ally) but at least HTC fig­ured out you can with the power button.

A ridicu­lous claw grip? Well, I’m scratch­ing my head as to how Seifert presses the power but­ton on the iPhone. Let me tell you how I do it: I assume a ridicu­lous claw grip with my pointy fin­ger on top of the device. And so do mil­lions of oth­ers. This is a non-issue. HTC design­ers did a great job of plac­ing the power but­ton in the mid­dle. The same logic applies to the camera.

I men­tioned you can’t design every­thing so it pro­vides the same expe­ri­ence for left- and right-handed folks. Well, that’s not true; you can. The vol­ume but­tons don’t need to be off to one side. The + can be on one side and the – can be on the other. A right-handed per­son like me while grip­ping the phone with my left hand will usu­ally press the left side of the phone with the thumb and assume some­thing will go up. In this case + but­ton on the left side of the phone can be set to increase, and vice versa for the – but­ton on the right. For left-handed folks the set­tings can be reversed.

Instead of just leav­ing the bottom-located Micro USB port open and acces­si­ble, HTC decided to put an infer­nal pro­tec­tive flap over the jack, mak­ing it far more dif­fi­cult to access when­ever you need to charge your phone. The silly lit­tle flap is fid­dly to remove and fid­dly to put back in place when you remove the USB cable, and its frus­trat­ing every time you use it. This idea wasn’t good on the Palm Pre back in 2009, and it’s not good on the DNA in 2012.

Take a macro lens to the inside of the 30-pin con­nec­tor and you’ll be greeted with filth, and a lot of it. I pre­fer there to be some sort of pro­tec­tive flap. We have the phone with us most of the time and gen­er­ally don’t need access to the micro USB port and cer­tainly don’t have a habit of star­ing at the bot­tom of the phone. Only when we need to charge it do we need to access the micro USB port. That’s usu­ally once per day; unfor­tu­nately for the HTC Droid DNA that could be twice per day. So no, I don’t think hav­ing a pro­tec­tive flap over the micro USB port was a bad design deci­sion. HTC could have made it less flimsy though.

Color repro­duc­tion and view­ing angles are eas­ily best in class, and the DNA has no prob­lems out­doors in bright sun­light. Like the One X’s SLCD 2 dis­play, the air gap between the glass and the LCD on the DNA is so small that it almost looks like images are float­ing on the screen.

I don’t know how you can eye­ball things like color repro­duc­tion and view­ing angles and declare them to be best in class. One of the best maybe, but best in class? Let’s wait and see what Raymond Soneira says to declare the HTC Droid DNA the best when it comes to color accu­racy and view­ing angles. I was hop­ing the cover glass was opti­cally lam­i­nated to the LCD, but if what Seifert wrote is true then there is an air gap. No mat­ter how small the exis­tence of an air gap between the cover glass and the LCD it is sim­ply not excus­able. Let’s hope Seifert is wrong and HTC opti­cally bonded the cover glass to the LCD. Fingers crossed.

For low-light pho­tos, the DNA has a f/2.0 lens to let in a lot of light, but it doesn’t have a fancy opti­cal sta­bi­liza­tion sys­tem as found on the Nokia Lumia 920. Pictures taken in low light are good, but they aren’t quite as good as those offered by the iPhone 5 or the Lumia 920.

Does this mean the HTC Droid DNA is #3 next only to the Nokia Lumia 920 and the iPhone 5 in terms of the qual­ity of pho­tos you get in low-light envi­ron­ments? I’ll take that. The cam­era seems to be top notch. The dis­play is with­out equal in terms of res­o­lu­tion and I like the over­all under­stated design. The posi­tion of the power but­ton as well as the micro USB cover is a plus in my book, but there is a seri­ous prob­lem. The biggest draw­back with the HTC Droid DNA seems to be bat­tery life: a smart­phone absolutely needs to last at least a full day. Oh, and one more thing: That ghastly Verizon logo on the front needs to go.