This is the HTC 10, HTC’s latest flagship smartphone. By now, you’ve probably heard some pretty good things about this phone; whether it’s been through our unboxing videos or first-look videos or from some others. HTC has had a rough year in 2015 where it released the HTC One M9, which tried to carry on the success of the One M8 and One M7. And while it wasn’t a bad phone at the time, it quite simply didn’t impress the masses.

Well, HTC is back at it again with the HTC 10; bringing a fresh new design and dropping the One M branding. We’re going to spend about 30 days, give or take, analyzing this phone; determining whether the display and the processor and the build stacks up to the competition. How does it compare to the likes of the Galaxy S7, the S7 edge, LG G5 or Nexus 6P; especially in a time when people are upgrading less often and have less of a reason to upgrade smartphones.

So let’s get some of the basics out of the way first. The build of the HTC 10 is excellent. It’s just like past HTC smartphones. It features a unibody aluminum construction with a very unsubtle chamfered edge that stretches around the entire rear of the phone. Up front, we’ll find a beautiful 5.2-inch Super LCD 5 display with a dense QHD resolution. There’s a home capacitive touch navigation button that doubles as a fingerprint scanner. Flanked on the other side is a back and multi-tasking capacitive touch button. What we don’t see are those stereo front-facing speakers. There is a top-facing speaker grill and a bottom-facing speaker grill but they aren’t exactly the same as the front-facing stereo speakers found in previous flagship smartphones. We’ll be sure to spend some time with these speakers over the course of the next month to see and have it compared.

Of course, the 10 is running HTC Sense on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. HTC has actually worked with Google to remove a lot of the bloatware and the duplicate applications. You’ll see there is a lot of stocky Android elements present in here so if you’re a pure Android junkie, you should really enjoy the software experience that the HTC 10 has to offer. And if you don’t, you can customize it, add a launcher of your choice, change the app icons and all that fun stuff. But powering the phone is a Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor paired with 4GB of RAM and the Adreno 530 GPU.

As for the cameras, the front features a 5MP Ultra Pixel sensor with an f1.8 aperture and Optical Image Stabilization. On the rear is a 12MP f1.8 aperture sensor and it too features OIS as well as laser autofocus. Under the hood is a 3,000 mAh battery which HTC says can last two full days on a single charge. We’ll see about that. Spoiler: it doesn’t last two full days for me. But it’s not bad.

So if you’re completely new to the HTC 10 or maybe you’ve just only heard about the device in passing, you should know the very basics of what the phone consists of and it competes very well with pretty much any other flagship smartphone in 2016 definitely in terms of specs. What the 30-day challenge will consist of is a detailed look at each section of the device: how the build holds up, the display, the software, performance, cameras, speakers, and battery life. Then we’ll wrap it up with a final video that quantifies the pros and cons of the device to determine if it is daily drive material, who the phone is geared towards (that is to say what kind of user should buy the HTC 10) and how it stacks up to the competition.