Despite its great looks, the HTC U Ultra wasn't very well received by the press. In his review of the U Ultra, David absolutely ripped the phone apart, saying that it's unclear why the phone exists at all, and that HTC should go back to the drawing board. One of David's complaints about the phone was how easily the display scratched. In his latest video, JerryRigEverything proves that there's a lot more wrong with the phone's durability than that.

Zack (not Jerry) starts his destruction of the U Ultra off with a scratch test, and the phone scratches at a not-terrible level 6 on the Mohs scale. For what it's worth, that's a little inconsistent with David's experience - his review unit had terrible scratches on it after just a week of use. The fingerprint sensor likely won't scratch significantly in normal use, but it can get pretty messed up; thankfully, though, the scratched-up sensor still works. The front-facing camera is covered by glass, but the earpiece is, unfortunately, a cloth unit.

We then move on to the back. The rear glass and camera are both able to resist scratches from a razor blade, but the flash and laser autofocus are both plastic and show marks pretty quickly. It's important to note that the autofocus module could potentially be rendered useless by those scratches, given its purpose. Following this, Zack begins to sketch a figure based off of lyrics from Eiffel 65's "I'm Blue" with a Mohs level 9 pick. Due to the hardness of the tool and the repeated scratches, the glass cracks quite easily. However, the fully metal chassis makes up for that a bit.

The screen recovers from JerryRigEverything's signature flame test, but gets destroyed by the bend test. The glass only cracks so heavily due to the existing scratches and cracks on the back, but it wouldn't have aided in the rigidity in the phone even if it were completely intact. While the phone doesn't die from the bend test, the fact that it's so easy to bend causes a bit of uneasiness in my stomach.

So... yeah. Now, there's really no reason to buy a U Ultra. It's not particularly quick, its camera isn't great, it doesn't have a headphone jack, it's not very durable, and at $750, it's rather expensive. The phone looks decent overall (the front of the phone really doesn't look that nice, though), but its competitors are by no means hideous. You can do better, HTC.

Source: JerryRigEverything (YouTube)