Well after much thought I took the plunge and upgraded to the One with EE. I'd sidegraded from Three because although the latter do exceptionally good mobile web and you can download with no limits, they have virtually no coverage in much of my mum's town where I'm a frequent visitor.
I got the HTC One 32GB in silver, on the £46/month contract (unlimited mins/texts and 3GB data). My S3 LTE says that since we got cable installed at home I'm only using between 700MB and 1.8GB a month over the last six months, so 3GB for mobile use is ample for me. I'm getting 50Mbps down and 15Mbps up on EE, too.
I was immediately impressed with EE, and even more so when I rang and discovered they operate with UK based call centres only.
Well worth the extra few pounds a month imho, but I realise that's subjective.
I was (and am) enthralled with the One. It's a big upgrade from my S3 LTE and feels much faster and smoother. The UI is like greased lightning and the addition of Flash in the stock browser is a huge bonus imho. The only thing I was REALLY worried about after reading reviews was the camera quality.
However, in the real world the pics are perfectly fine even before tweaking (changing sharpness, exposure and contrast in the settings). I get nice 1080p pics with nice full natural colour, and at the end of the day they're great for Facebook, Twitter, sharing with relatives etc and that's all a camera phone needs to do. The 'Boomsound' stereo speakers are a huge upgrade for me, as I'm very hard of hearing with total hearing loss on one side, and high and low range hearing loss on the other. Calls (and especially the loudspeaker calls) are HUGELY improved for me with this handset!
Now the downside. After going outside today I immediately noticed that the screen had two large-ish white 'specs'. On closer inspection it was dust particles laminated between the glass and LCD screen.
I know I'm not the first to suffer this, and it's spoiled what was otherwise a wonderful phone. Shame on HTC for such poor QC during production tbh. They have a wonderful unibody, great classy design and top spec features, only to ruin it with minor details.
Kudos to EE though, as they've just said nip into any store and they'll confirm it and courier me a brand new handset next-day. So here's hoping the next, erm, One doesn't have any issues!
Stuff happens though, and being honest it hasn't spoiled my overall impression of this nicely made, solid and premium-feeling phone. If anyone is torn between this and the S4, you won't be disappointed with the One! It's also nice to have 25GB free space to play with after everything I need is installed. Yes you miss out on the S-series microSD, but when you can't install apps to it anyway, what's the point?
Does anyone know when the latest 4.2.2 update comes out on EE? I'm looking forward to it more for the re-addition of the ability to map the overflow menu button to the back key than anything else!
Unbelievable 