HTC”s latest flagship phone, the One M8 has been put through its paces by our grubby little paws for the past three weeks and here’s our review.
Lovely HTC One M8 all boxed up.
The HTC One M8 is the newest top-of-the-range smartphone on offer from the Taiwanese tech giants. It’s the successor to last year’s HTC One M7, a ground-breaking Android phone, with a stunning design and generally considered as the best smartphone of 2013. So does the M8 look likely to retain the title in 2014? We’ve put the M8 to the test for a few weeks to get a real feel for it in daily use and here’s what we think.
DESIGN
HTC’s design-team can give themselves a well-deserved pat on the back again this year. The M8 continues with a nearly all-round metal casing we first saw in the One M7 with the beautiful brushed aluminium rear providing a surprisingly tactile grip. It gives the M8 a strong, durable feel, surprising in a phone so thin and light. The M8′s corners are slightly more rounded than the M7, and whilst this does make it easier to slip in and out of your pocket, I do feel that it makes the shape of the phone rather generic.
Full frontal in all its glory.
The case curves around the sides of the phone to meet the Gorilla Glass front, broken by the sim card slot on the right side with the SD card slot (thankfully) and volume rocker on the left. The volume button is metallic, sitting out a little far from the case and I did press it inadvertently several times when pocketing the device, blasting my ears out of it. At the top of the phone, a black plastic insert hides the IR lens, breaking up the all-round metal, but taking nothing away from the design. The power button is also situated here, made of the same black plastic, well-set and not interrupting the casing’s flow. At the bottom of the phone you can find the USB port and the headset jack.
The rear of the case is broken up by two thin black bands at the top and bottom and the HTC logo in the centre. The bands are where the antennas are hidden, as metal cases have proven in the past to cause issues with transmission. At the top of the rear casing there are two camera lenses and LED lights. The lights are set to the left of the larger lens, the smaller lens sitting a couple of centimeters above the large lens, over the upper black band. The duo-camera is a feature we’ll cover later on.
Look at the rear on that!
The front of the M8 has a tough Gorilla Glass cover for the 5-inch screen. At the top and bottom (or left and right if you’re viewing in landscape) are the two powerful speakers (more of which later), with the top speaker being slightly shorter than the bottom to allow for the inclusion of an LED notification light and the front-facing camera lens. At the bottom of the glass, between the screen and the lower speaker, there’s another HTC logo.
The phone is available in three colours – “Metal Gray”, “Arctic Silver” and “Amber Gold” and the choice of colour will be a purely aesthetic decision for any new user. I mentioned earlier that the phone feels strong and durable despite its thin size and for those amongst you who like the numbers, the M8′s vital statistics are as follows; 146.36mm long and 70.6mm wide, giving the device a slightly elongated look and feel. The phone is 9.35mm thick which means that it is slightly chunkier than the new Samsung Galaxy S5 and the iPhone 5s (at 8.1mm and 7.6mm) respectively, but the differences are minimal and barely noticeable.
HTC’s flagship is also heavier than the Samsung and Apple, coming in at 160g, but given the M8′s stunning case, a few grammes here and there can easily be forgiven. This is not a heavy phone, especially given the amount of metal on show.
Room for a second sim perhaps?
The HTC uses a nano-sim card, but the sim card slot itself looks to me that it may have originally been designed to hold two nano-sims. Can we expect a dual-sim version later in the year perhaps? One of the best advances in the design of the M8 over its predecessor is the inclusion of an SD card slot. One of the M7′s (admittedly few flaws) was the lack of expandable memory and the inclusion of an SD card slot supporting up to 128GB is a welcome addition to the M8.
The overall design of the HTC One M8 is stunning. Even hardcore iPhone fans have admitted to me that it is a thing of beauty. HTC’s One M7 from last year blew every other phone out of the water with its stunning design and the M8 has continued in the same vein. It will be interesting to see how Cupertino react to the challenge set by HTC with their iPhone 6 design later this year.
PERFORMANCE
The M8 packs the 2.3GHz version of the Snapdragon 801 processor along with 2GB of RAM which gives a slick feel during use. Switching between apps is seamless and unlocks and screen transitions are very fast and smooth. If you’re interested in benchmarks, we used AnTuTu to get a rating of 34155, a very impressive score. I don’t generally play high-end games on my phone, but I tried a couple on the M8 including Call of Duty: Strike Team, Star Command and Asphalt 8: Airborne. They all performed amazingly well, with the odd frame drop in Asphalt, but nothing that will effect your gameplay.
AnTuTu says AMAZING! I tend to agree.
The M8 also uses the low-power “Motion Launch” processor which allows the user to turn the phone on with the double-tap feature. The chip basically monitors the phone’s accelerometer when the phone is in standby. HTC promoted this feature quite heavily on launch, but it’s really nothing new as the iPhone 5s has it’s M7 motion sensor and many LG phones have also had it for a while now.
SCREEN
The HTC One M8 is rocking a lovely 5 inch SLCD screen at 1080p and 441ppi. The screen is bigger than the M7′s 4.7 incher but oddly enough the pixel density is slightly less than the M7′s 469ppi. However, this makes absolutely no difference to the quality of the image onscreen.
Great colours on-screen.
The colours on the M8′s screen are very real compared to the vivid colours seen on both the Galaxy S5 and the top end Sonys, being accurate and true to life. The whites in particular are very clear, especially compared to the M7, which I felt had a slight yellowish tinge to whites on its screen. The blacks are deep and solid as well.
More great colours & deep blacks.
When the screen’s brightness is set to full, the luminance is incredible. This gives the phone excellent visibility in bright sunlight, hampered somewhat by the high reflectivity of the screen itself. With very bright direct light sources, even with the screen brightness up to the max, I did find the screen difficult to read due to the reflectivity. It’s a small gripe though and nothing that a bit of tilting or shading couldn’t sort out as the viewing angles are excellent.
The M8′s screen is very responsive and it’s easy to read text and menus when scrolling through.
BATTERY
The phone has a non-removable 2600mAh battery, which during the past couple of weeks has proven to be a solid performer given heavy day-to-day use. I found that even with a lot of internet usage, social media posting, calls, texts and emails, I could get at least 12 hours out of the battery before low power warnings started to appear. For a video test, with the screen at full brightness and the wifi switched off, I measured a seven hour running time for a HD video, which was very impressive.
HTC offers two power saving modes on the phone – “Power Saver” and “Extreme Power Saver”. The former is a very effective power management system for the phone. It has several customisable options allowing the user to conserve CPU usage, reduce screen brightness, turn off vibration feedback and put the data connection to sleep when the screen is off. Basically, the phone uses little to no power when in standby. The “Power Saver” mode on my regular usage pushed the battery time over the 20 hour mark before the warnings started to appear.
Extreme Power Saver mode.
The “Extreme Power Saver” mode puts the phone into (as the name suggests) an extreme power saving mode when the battery reaches a power level set by the user (20%, 10% or 5%). This allows you to squeeze a few extra hours out of the battery. The phone switches off background data and shows a basic interface allowing access to just a few basic functions - phone, messages, email, calculator and calendar.
Using the supplied 1.5A charger, I found that the battery charges quickly, taking approximately two hours to go from empty to full.
I did have a concern that the inability to switch out the battery would be a non-runner for me, but given the excellent battery life and the power saving modes, my fears proved unfounded. It would be a very rare occasion when having a second fully charged battery available to pop in would arise.
CAMERA
The M8 has two lenses and two sensors on the rear of the phone. The main camera uses a 4-megapixel “UltraPixel” sensor. Rather than packing in the megapixels, the “Ultrapixel” camera uses a more advanced CMOS sensor and optical lens system that HTC claims captures more light than most 8 or 13-megapixel cameras. The second sensor is a lower resolution device which supplies secondary information rather than image data. So what does all that mean whilst using the camera?
The two cameras (& LED flash/torch).
Well, as the secondary sensor is in a different place to the primary camera, it registers depth and allows you to apply depth to photos after shooting. Using the in-phone feature of UFocus, this allows you to digitally defocus parts of an image in post, in much the same way that a dedicated camera allows a shallow depth of field. Here’s a couple of examples:
Regular shot.
UFocus applied.
This Duo Camera effect is quite limited in its application as using low-light mode, HDR, filters or digital zooming prevents the re-focussing. At the moment, the Duo Camera feels a little gimmicky due to both software and hardware issues. The software will probably take a bit of time to evolve to a stage where it is able to apply the effects to more photos, but it is an interesting step into the future. The hardware limitation is the main problem though, given the secondary depth camera does not come close to the specs of the main “UltraPixel” sensor having a different resolution and sensor size. Perhaps the next iteration of the HTC One will solve these issues?
The front-facing camera is a standard (not “UltraPixel”) 5-megapixel sensor and gives great selfie!
UBIQUITOUS SELFIE! Yes, that’s a giant blue chocolate lollipop. No, you can’t have one.
The HTC camera app is simple enough and HTC claim to have made their app even easier to use. The app has two basic screens, the Mode Selector and the Shooting Screen. This makes the app easy to use and gives immediate access to normal shooting, selfie (front camera), video, dual capture (rear and front cameras shooting together), 360 degree panorama and Zoe (which shoots video and takes stills at the same time for creating a highlights package).
Camera app Mode Selector screenshot.
Camera app Shooting Screen screenshot.
If you’re an experienced photographer, or even if you like to mess around with settings, you’ll have to explore deeper into the app. The settings button will give you access to a wealth of options, including ISO, exposure, white balance, scene settings (the HDR setting is tucked away in here), filter effects and the base camera settings as well. The scene setting menu in addition to the regular settings (portrait, landscape, etc), also includes the HDR settings, regular panorama mode and a full manual mode, vital if you’re a camera junkie.
Camera app screenshot showing advanced settings.
The manual mode is fantastic, allowing you to change ISO, focusing and shutter speeds along with colour temperature and exposure compensation. It also makes night-time photography much easier and allows you to get quite creative with your shots. The other scene settings seemed to me to be stripped down and using the auto setting worked better for me.
Overall, it’s a fantastic app packed full of features, but involves a lot of tinkering to get the most out of the hardware and software. That being said, there are plenty of tutorials available online that can teach you how to get the most out of the HTC for your photography.
SOUND & CALL QUALITY
As mentioned earlier, the HTC One M8 has two front-facing stereo speakers at the top and bottom (or left and right) of the screen, following on from their first appearance on the M7. The speakers do make the phone look and feel a little tall, but they’re definitely worth it. I’m surprised it took so long for a phone manufacturer to come up with speakers either side of the screen, but HTC have come up trumps here. The speakers have built-in amps allowing rich, clear and loud sound without the usual dreadful distortion heard from phone speakers. And even though the speakers are tiny, the bass sound is excellent and they really excel in the mid-range.
The only problem occurs when playing games, as your thumbs tend to lie over the speakers, but I’m just being picky here.
Decent headphones supplied.
The M8 comes with a set of pretty decent in-ear headphones that give excellent sound right across the range. I was very impressed with these, as usually headphones supplied with devices tend to be rubbish. And the sound was even more impressive through a set of Sennheiser speakers, giving a fantastic listening experience across all ranges.
There are two music players pre-installed on the M8 – Google Music which is centred on cloud-streaming music and the HTC Music Player, which is better at playing music stored on the device or the SD card. Given the wealth of decent music apps available on the Play Store, in addition to personal listening tastes, whichever app you use will be arbitrary. Suffice to say that both apps performed well in their respective fields, but I did go back to my app of choice after a couple of days.
As you’d expect, the call quality was also superb, both with and without headphones. Crisp and clear with very little interference and I experienced no call drops during my usage of the device. I can categorically state that the M8 is without a doubt the best sound experience I’ve ever had with a phone.
MISCELLANEOUS
So, what else does the HTC One M8 offer? Firstly, the phone runs Android 4.4 with HTC’s own Sense 6 User Interface. The Sense UI has been overhauled since the M7, but to be honest, I didn’t notice a massive difference between the two. Sense 6 comes with the BlinkFeed widget, a Flipbook-esque update feed that amalgamates all of your social media and news feeds into a single screen. BlinkFeed scrolls similarly to a Windows Phone UI and even has a similar look. The overall feel of Sense 6 is much closer to the stock Android UI found on Nexus devices and it provides a nice, smooth, hassle free user experience.
BlinkFeed screenshot.
Standard Home Screen screenshot.
However, I must admit that I only used the Sense UI for four or five days before switching to a completely customised UI experience. The customisability of Android is one of the reasons why I love the operating system and the HTC One M8 handled my own set-up beautifully!
Custom Home Screen screenshot.
The addition of a SD card slot which can support cards with a capacity of up to 128GB is a very welcome addition. Given that the standard capacity phone is just 16GB the extra storage will prove invaluable for photographers and folks who like to take their music or video collections with them everywhere they go.
As you’d expect from a phone with a great screen and amazing sound, watching videos is quite an immersive experience. With or without headphones, the M8 provides a lovely mobile platform for catching up on those TV episodes on your commute or even watching a movie. I will say that the Google video player app that comes pre-installed on the device is not great, but there are lots of very good free apps on the Play Store that will provide you with a full video experience. I personally recommend the VLC Media Player or the MX Player, which can both handle a huge variety of video codecs.
The M8 also has a few feature apps installed. The first of these is Fitbit, which allows you to use the HTC as a pedometer and general fitness tracker. The Fitbit app is not however HTC exclusive and can be downloaded from the Play Store to any Android phone. It’s really a gimmick and I went back to using MyTracks after a couple of days.
Another non-HTC app found on board the 2014 One is Kid Mode. This changes your interface into a cute, kid-friendly space, allowing you to hand the phone over to the little ones to keep them amused. Having no children to test this on, I can’t give a genuine opinion on the app. However, given that Kid Mode is also available on the Play Store, feel free to check it out.
TV app screenshot.
There’s also HTC’s Sense TV app, which first appeared on the M7. The app has been tweaked and allows you to control your TV, satellite box and even DVD player through your phone’s IR blaster (which is hidden under the black plastic panel at the top of the phone, beside the power button). I loved it. The app is easy to set-up, quickly paired with my various devices and even shows a TV guide of local channels. A great app that will genuinely rid of the fumble down the side of the sofa, searching for the correct remote.
Dot Matrix cover in action.
Finally, I had the chance to use HTC’s dot matrix cover whilst reviewing the phone. My first thoughts upon seeing the cover for the first time were that it was just another marketing ploy. However, I am pleased to say that the case itself provides excellent protection for your phone, both screen and rear. Yes, the ability to view the time and weather with a quick double tap to the case is a certainly a little gimmicky, it did get a lot of “cool” exclamations from friends and family when demonstrated. Far more useful is the ability to see and answer (or reject) incoming phone calls through the case. Nice one HTC!
CONCLUSION
The HTC One M8 is a cracking phone. Beautifully designed with a great screen, stunning sound and swift performance, it’s going to be hard to take the “Best Smartphone” crown from HTC in 2014. However the competition is tougher this year: The waterproof Samsung Galaxy S5 is released into the wild already, Sony has upped their game with their top-end phones (in particular the Experia Z2) and a selection of other contenders from both LG and Motorola are all in the Android segment alone. And that’s not including the vanilla Android experience offered by the Nexus line. Throw in the Nokia Lumia 1020′s genre-breaking camera and the fact that Cupertino are likely to be releasing an entirely new iPhone (the 6) later in the year and will not be a walkover for the M8.
But overall, I cannot recommend the phone highly enough. During my three weeks of daily usage, the phone has survived a stag weekend, a whiskey tasting, a couple of rugby matches, several days of filming and a wedding, keeping me connected and powered throughout. I took lots of photos, listened to plenty of music, watched a few movies, sent emails and texts, browsed the internet and even actually made a few phone calls. All without a hitch.
See, I was at a whiskey tasting!
The M8′s everyday ease-of-use due to the simplified Sense 6 UIand the excellent battery make the M8 a very viable alternative to iFans who may be searching for something new and just as stylish. The high-performance and standard Android customisability will appeal to tech geeks. And the incredible sound performance is bound to get audiophiles eyeing up the M8.
The HTC One M8 is certainly a top contender for the best smartphone I’ve ever used.