HTC released its new flagship smartphone this morning, the HTC One, in a bid to revive its slide into irrelevancy. Samsung has been eating away at its profits over the last year, and the company is no longer the top dog in the Android smartphone market. So can the HTC One change that?

An early look shows some things to really like about HTC’s direction, and some things to be skeptical of. As Chris Mims notes at Quartz, it’s not clear that its amazing new screen will really translate into much benefit for users:

One of the most impressive specifications of the HTC One is its screen, which has the same resolution as a high definition television, 1920 by 1080 pixels, but is just 4.7? across the diagonal. Let me put that another way: Imagine taking a 42? HD TV off the wall and magically shrinking it to the size of a smartphone.

The trouble is, it’s not clear that this matters. Owing to the limits of human visual acuity, a screen with the resolution of the HTC One’s implies that the average user is going to be holding their phone about a half foot from his or her face. Any further away, and you’d miss out on the full awesomeness of it.

But it’s not all bad. In particular, the new home-screen-as-feed, BlinkFeed, has real promise.

The idea is to make the home screen a highly visual, easily navigable content stream. And that makes a ton of sense. The current smartphone home screen basically mirrors the desktop, which hasn’t bothered to change much primarily because no one really uses it much anymore.

The idea of flipping through a variety of content from my various apps is pretty appealing. In a way, this is sort of a more aggressive and visual approach to what BlackBerry is trying to do with its alerts feed in its new OS: aggregate content, updates and more from all your apps into one experience provided by the phone’s native software.

Accepting Facebook friendships through your activity stream is nice, but I find HTC’s approach a bit more plausible.

For more product details, check out all the usual suspects. And enjoy photos of the HTC One below: