Review of the HTC One (M8)
Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 6:47PM
Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The original HTC One slowly but surely captured the hearts of smartphone lovers everywhere and while sales of this HTC flagship should have been much better, there was no denying its place in the pantheon of great smartphone models.
Much of the HTC One’s excellence was too good to contain in one model. HTC quickly spun off the HTC One mini and the HTC One max (available in certain markets, not in Canada). But soon, the time came to release the next flagship. Here are my impressions.
While Samsung already played its Android flagship card for the year during the Samsung Galaxy S5 launch, that device wasn’t coming to market for some time.
The abundance of leaks of the ‘all new HTC One’ hinted that HTC’s latest and greatest had been available for some time and indeed various beta devices had already been seeded to HTC executives and other insiders.
The launch date and subsequent availability of the HTC One (M8), which for brevity I’ll just be calling M8, was both tactical and surgical. The flood of information and subsequent availability of HTC's new superphone sucked the air out of any anticipation for the Galaxy S5 which was announced much earlier but is shipping later.
M8 – A natural progression
You don’t mess with a Porsche 911.
That is, once a powerful and recognizable product has become an iconic representation of its manufacturer, it would be foolish to change it dramatically with something completely different.
Last year’s HTC One is the company’s Porsche 911 and just like how Porsche slowly and deliberately iterates that most beloved of sports car year after year, HTC saw it wise to improve the best aspects of their hero device while adding features that users wanted.
The HTC One M8 is still a Porsche 911, but this one is a Turbo and it comes in new colours and improved build and finishes. The interior has also seen a welcome upgrade.
The Quad-core 2.3 GHz Snapdragon processor and 2GB of RAM provide blazing fast performance and speedy multitasking. The Adreno 330 graphics will result in impressive video and even game performance that's the top of the smartphone class.
The M8 is undeniably an HTC One, it is cut from the same cloth as its predecessors but now more rounded, tapered, smoother and less edgy.
The screen is larger and the pixel density may have dropped, but unless you were rocketed to Earth from the planet Krypton, it’s not possible to see the difference in lack of detail or pixel density.
Because of the larger screen, the M8 is taller than the older One but still fits quite nicely in one hand as they’ve kept the bezels thin. It is both familiar, yet new.
The 5-inch full 1080p HD display is stunning to watch videos on even if when the brightness setting is low. It is also great for games and even for reading using reading apps like Amazon Kindle, Kobo and FlipBoard.
5-inches is the upper limit for one-handed use. I felt that with the BlackBerry Z30, and the same goes for the M8. Users with smaller hands will still struggle with one handed use but it won't be anywhere as challenging as larger smarpthones and phablets.
5-inch handset done right
The M8 joins the 5-inch smartphone class, which it shares with the BlackBerry Z30, Samsung Galaxy S4 and various other leading class smartphones that two years ago would have been ridiculed as a Phablet.
The larger 5-inch 1080p LCD screen features a density 440 pixels per inch, down from 469 from the smaller 4.7-inch screen of last year's model, but individual pixels are still invisible to the naked eye and picture fidelity is still impressive.
The image quality, saturation and brightness on this display is top notch and watching videos is a treat, specially now with the rejigged BoomSound speakers that are louder but also fuller in sound quality. The best sound on a smartphone just got better.
What sets the M8 apart from its peers, or indeed, from almost any smartphone on the market today, is that its body is made mostly from aluminum and glass with nary a sign of the polycarbonate that was the crème of the aluminum sandwich of the original HTC One.
The exterior is finished with an exquisite brushed metal, or satin finish and the rounded contours are more refined, subtle but also surprisingly slippery. Previously recessed volume buttons are now more tactile and all-around, the lines and crevices and dozens of small details have been tightened up and improved.
It’s easier to build a whole new phone than to eke away at something, improve it substantially and still retain the key aspects that make it recognizable. HTC surely didn’t take the easy way out with the M8.
Premium inside and out
The result is a premium smartphone that looks and feels like a premium smartphone should.
Which means it doesn’t feel cheap or poorly conceived. The M8 has that cohesive x-factor which makes it feel good in the hand and makes it hard to put down.
The glacial silver TELUS review unit has a rich satin finish and the gunmetal grey launch unit we saw in New York last week has an attractive brushed gunmetal look which HTC say took a lot of time to get right.
Perhaps it is the abundance of cool aluminum, the friendly feel of the rounded edges or even its well-balanced feel, possibly a combination of all of these factors that makes the M8 a pleasure to hold and very hard to put down.
Just like with the iPhone 5s, I keep finding small details and touches in the build quality of the M8 that make me think, "my, this is a good looking phone."
HTC has also looked at what users want and while they've bumped up the specs on their flagship substantially, most users will appreciate the change to a nanoSIM as well as the inclusion of a microSD expansion slot.
The low cost of expansion cards makes it dead easy and affordable to double and even triple one's storage capability on the M8. Users can now pack HD videos, photos and files without worrying that they are cluttering up their internal memory. A good move for HTC. Users also get 65GB of extra Google Drive storage for two years as a bonus.
Battery life is another area where the M8 seems to have improved. A larger internal battery coupled with improved power management.
Even without the Extreme Power Saving Mode applied, I managed to get a day and a half of generally heavy use out of the M8 which is impressive for a powerful 5-inch device
Sense 6
The new Sense 6 UI is similar to the previous version but much more sprightly.
Switching and scrolling is instantaneous now and everything just feels more responsive.
BlinkFeed on the original HTC One was a cool feature that was soon forgotten but this time around, the level of customization as well as the responsiveness of the app itself makes it a notable feature.
HTC is hoping to bring these to other non-HTC handsets and it looks like a viable competitor to FlipBoard provided they can translate the experience across devices.
It seems we've reached a point with smartphone interfaces where we need to invoke functionality beyond the borders of the screen.
Swiping up from the bottom on most modern Android devices will call Google Now. The M8 and Sense 6 requires a swipe from the left to bring up Blinkfeed. It is an easy enough thing to remember.
It can get confusing when you're scrolling through Blinkfeed and you accidentally trigger Google Now.
One of my niggles with Sense on the original HTC One was the spacing between icons and widgets was a little off .
There's still too much spacing between icons but it appears this can be remedied by installing a new launcher app so no biggie.
I still feel that Sense UI can use some more refinement, an overhaul of app icons, transitions and general look and feel should be expected through time.
BoomSound Speakers
The HTC One already had the most impressive stereo speakers on a smartphone and while Beats Audio is no longer prominently featured on HTC devices (mainly because HTC sold its share of Beats Audio). The speakers on the M8 are still powerful and loud but now have more depth and definition. As far as speakers on a mobile phone go, this is as close to true surround sound that I've experienced specially when watching video or movies that have that grandiose soundstage and various layers of effects, music and dialogue. Gone is the bass-heaviness that's a given on most Monster and Beats products, we now get more definition.
Dual Camera
I feel the M8 model name of the new HTC One is a nod to Leica and its popular premium rangefinder. The photographic capabilities of HTC's smartphones have been major features and the M8 is no different. The addition of a secondary camera, which serves as a sensor for depth and distance, helps create a forced depth of field previously only possible by using ultra-sharp premium lenses.
Since the M8 doesn't have a prime lens, much of this bokeh effect is carried out via software and while its easy to be skeptical about this feature, which HTC named uFocus, it seems to work really well in most conditions.
The lack of optical image stabilization (OIS) is something users who are coming from other phones might miss.
It isn't too big a deal when shooting stills or making Zoe's but it does hurt your chances of shooting steady video. It seems losing stabilization was the price to pay for including the second camera. The video above was shot handheld and close to the body, I did my best not to move but it is evident that image stabilization is lacking.
The Ultrapixel camera isn't vastly improved from last year but the software, the effects and HTC Zoe have all gotten significant upgrades so there's more fun to be had by toying with the controls. One particular feature I enjoyed was the 3D effect that enables photos to look 3D when you move around the phone.
I'll be posting more photos from the M8 shortly but I find that the quality and detail are very much the same as that of the HTC One M7, which is a good thing.
Conclusion
The HTC One (M8) is one of the most powerful smartphones I've ever tested, but it is also an Android phone a good range of features to it apart from the competition.
Anyone in the market for a large and powerful Android smartphone and who doesn't need the water resistant feature will be delighted with what the M8 has to offer. Owners of the original HTC One still have most of the winning features of that device so unless a microSD Card slot or slightly larger screen is an imperative, they'll do well to hold off upgrading.
This is the best pound for pound Android device in the market today. From a high-level of build quality and precision, improved feature set, better camera software and addition of microSD expansion, plus a long list of refinements to the hardware and software, it is a triumph of smartphone design and execution.
The HTC One (M8) will cost aroud $700 out of contract (or for that elusive Google Play edition), but it feels and performs like a $700 device and despite a few rough edges in software, it really does feel like a precision tool.
Aside from making the M8 waterproof (at least officially), it seems there's little else HTC could have done in one year to make the M8 better. I've been averse to 5-inch smartphones because many of the ones I've tried were just too unwieldy, but the M8 has really changed my mind and I've found it to be an amazing device to carry and use.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Check out the rest of our HTC One (M8) coverage below.
Rogers leaks official specs of HTC One (M8)
SlideShow: Live from HTC One (M8) launch event in NY
TELUS goes live with HTC One (M8) pre-order and purchase
Rogers confirms availability of HTC One M8, reservation now open
Video: See the HTC One (M8) camera feature and new Dot View Case
Video: HTC One M8 Dual Camera and editing feature demo
Video: Demo of the HTC One M8's IR blaster and second screen functionality
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