So I recently upgraded my phone, and after a lengthy deliberation between the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the new HTC One I ultimately went for the latter.

Before I go into my impressions of the phone, I wanted to take a brief look back at all the phones I've used over the years and how they've continually evolved. A little mobile nostalgia trip if you will.

My memories of my first phone are a bit hazy, being that it's been over years since I had it, so I don't remember the exact model name. It was a Motorola flip phone under Cingular. It could text, and call, and take some really tiny grainy pictures. It wasn't much, but it was my first phone.

I'm not exactly sure when I got the phone but I had it for a few years before upgrading to my second phone sometime in 2005.

In 2005 I upgraded to the new hotness (at the time). A phone that many of you may remember as being one of the coolest phones of the early 2000's (alongside the Sidekick). Yes, if you guess the Motorola Razr you guess correctly.

Though still a flip phone it was somehow more than that, it came in multiple colours and finishes. I opted for the silver model and I absolutely loved that phone. To this day I still think it's one of the nicest looking phones ever. This phone lasted me most of my middle school days from around 2005 to 2008

Around the end of middle school and early highschool I switched from my beloved Razer to something a bit more modern, meaning it had a full keypad, a touch screen and multimedia functionality and internet access. This phone was the Samsung BlackJack 2.

The phone looked nice, giving off some serious Blackberry vibes which at the time was still a sign of prestige and the phone every businessman wanted to have. Having a full keyboard was nice after coming from the old keypad phones but the phone itself was clunky and it's Windows Mobile OS was terrible. I was not a fan of this phone at all and that may explain why I moved on from it so quickly.

in 2009 I switched to an iPhone 3GS. The iPhone's were starting to sweep the market and I just had to see what the fuss was about. Coming from the BlackJack it was absolutely incredible, especially after jailbreaking it. This was my first REAL smartphone and it was awesome. The sheer idea that I could carry around what was essentially a *functioning* computer in my pocket (BlackJack doesn't count) was incredible. However, in the following few years Android-based phones started to rise offering increasingly competitive features and a much more customizable experience. They started drawing my eye....

So when my next upgrade rolled around in 2012 I shopped around a bit instead of going for the easy choice which would've been the iPhone 4. A cool new phone caught my eye, it was the HTC One X. It was slim, flashy and boasted a huge screen and killer specs. I quickly forgot about upgrading to an iPhone 4 and went with the One X. I definitely made the right choice. As my first foray into the Android OS I was pleasantly surprised and I grew to love the phone these past 2 years. However, it was time for an upgrade and I was planning on waiting until the summer but Best Buy's recent mobile promotion made me jump ship early.

The Galaxy line has been very appealing to me and I was deadset on an S4... that is, until I saw the new HTC One.

Let's start with the specs; the HTC One features a 4.7 inch full 1080p screen encased in a solid aluminum body giving the phone a very "premium" feel over similar phones with plastic bodies. It has a quad-core 1.7GHz processor and 1.5GB of DDR2 RAM. The model I went with had 32GB of internal storage, though it is available in 64GB versions as well. It lists a 15-18 hour talk time battery life and a staggering 500 hour standby life.

It's running Android's most recent OS alongsides HTC's custom blinkfeed OS which is meant to keep you in touch with the world and your social life at all times. I found this menu to be a bit cumbersome and instead prefer to use the simple app library menu. Thanks to it's extremely beefy specs the phone is blazingly fast and can multitask with ease. The screen itself is absolutely gorgous and makes watching videos much more enjoyable.

As with the previous HTC One X, it features Beats audio built in. It doesn't blow me away but having the extra "oomph" when listening to music is a nice touch.

It has two camera, one forward and one rear, almost a standard feature in phones these days. The forward camera is of course the more powerful of the two and is fairly decent. I haven't had much of a chance to experiment with it, but it does feel to be an improvement over the previous phones camera, if only a slight one.

In terms of colours there were a wide range available, but I choose to go with blue because it's much more eye popping and a lot more interesting that simple white or black again.

All in all, I'm definitely digging this phone and think it will serve me well for the next few years.

What about you guys? What phones do you have? What were your past favourites? Any memories to share? Any questions about the HTC One?