HTC One (m8) review

The original HTC One was such a design statement that the company has opted not to mess with the formula for its successor. With an all-metal design, faster internals and a larger screen, you could easily mistake the new handset for the original - until you turn it over and spot the unique dual camera.

As one of the few Android phones to truly compete with Apple in terms of design, the HTC One (m8) is a beautiful handset. The m8 is almost 90% metal, with the few slivers of plastic left only being used to ensure the best possible reception for the internal antennae. The curved back fits your hand comfortably and the brushed metal finish on our metal grey review unit glints in the light, making no mistake that the phone is made from metal rather than plastic. The m8 will also be available in gold and silver colours, but these have a more subtle matte finish.

The HTC One (m8) is slightly larger than the original HTC One, to make room for the bigger 5in LCD display. Both phones have the same 1,920x,1,080 resolution, which means pixel density has dropped from 469ppi on the 4.7in original to 441ppi here, but in practice it's still impossible to see individual pixels. The m8 looks incredibly sharp; even the tiniest of fonts are still legible and images are incredibly detailed. Image quality is fantastic, with natural colours and pure bright whites, along with impressively deep blacks for an LCD panel. With a peak brightness of 491cd/m2 and an sRGB colour spectrum coverage of 93.7%, the M8 is among the best LCD screens we've seen in a smartphone, rivalling the iPhone 5s in terms of brightness and contrast.

HTC's front-facing BoomSound speakers are a great match to the beautiful display, and make watching YouTube videos a joy; they are impressively loud, but also very clear, with no signs of distortion or clipping when pushed to their limits. There's even a small amount of bass, so you won't instantly need to reach for a pair of headphones when someone sends you the latest viral video.

It's at the back where you'll find the biggest change though; the Duo Camera is such an important feature that it almost deserves a review in itself. It uses the same 4-megapixel 'Ultrapixel' main sensor as the original HTC One, which has an oversized 1/3in sensor and larger 2.0um pixels to capture more light information than its competitors. However, this time it's paired with a second, depth-sensing camera. Used together, they let you choose the point of focus in an image even after you've pressed the shutter button, or add stylish bokeh effects to your images. Sadly optical image stabilisation has been cut to make room for this feature.

U Focus lets you selectively blur parts of an image

tapping anywhere on screen will refocus the image, in less than a second

Because it uses hardware, rather than software calculations to assign depth values to your images, the m8 is much faster than competing smartphone's efforts. Samsung's Galaxy S5 and the LG G Pro 2 both take five shots at once then stitch them together, giving you five possible points of focus but taking several seconds per shot. With the HTC we could take three or four different shots in the same amount of time. In practice, the effects make portraits and macro shots stand out, but sometimes refocusing an image would blur areas we wanted to keep in focus; there's no way to select the strength of the effect, so you're stuck with what the phone chooses for you.

In terms of picture quality, we were worried that by sticking with the same sensor as last year's model the m8 would suffer from the same issues - namely a lack of detail when taking wider landscapes and a lot of noise. In our outdoor test shots, the m8 captured plenty of detail in the foreground and middle distance, but objects in the far distance weren't nearly as well defined. Zooming in revealed smudgy details and a fair amount of pixellation. We also noticed a tendency for the sensor to over-expose scenes, with light sources bleeding into an image leaving unwanted bright spots.

Outdoors, the m8 captures plenty of detail in the foreground, although colours are muted

In comparison, Nokia's Lumia 1020 takes more vibrant photos

High Dynamic Range (HDR) effects are very strong, with no way to tone them down. You also lose refocusing abilities when using any mode other than Auto

If you're more of a night person, however, you'll love the m8's low-light abilities. Moving inside, it captured plenty of facial detail when shooting portraits; it was also quick to focus and quick to save each shot, which could make it the perfect nightclub companion. It also has a True Tone flash, which automatically adjusts the intensity and colour of the twin LEDs to produce more accurate low-light images. In our still life tests, it helped create a more even colour balance than other smartphones.

In low light, the m8 did a great job at preserving details, although noise is still visible once you zoom in

You can control white balance, ISO and shutter speed to negate some of this effect, saving your settings as a specific 'lens' that can be called up from the menus at any time. There are also a huge number of filters, effects and tools to choose from once you've taken a snap too, including the clever Dimensionalise mode which uses the depth data to add a 3D effect, where tilting the phone moves the image around. It's impossible to share these images online and preserve the effect, but it's a nice touch that can add a bit more interest to your photos. HTC's custom Camera app is sensibly laid out and very responsive, making it ideal for spur of the moment photography.

ACCESSORIES
HTC launched a set of official cases and covers for the m8 alongside the phone itself. The first is the Dot View case, a flip cover made from rubberised plastic with an entirely perforated front. It protects the phone's four corners with hard plastic bumpers and keeps the screen free of scratches when in a pocket or bag. The cover sits flat on the screen and flops closed under its own weight when opened flat on a table.

The really clever bit is how the screen adapts once the phone recognises you're using the case. Whereas a double tap would wake the phone by itself, here it shines the time, weather and any notifications through the perforated front cover to save you having to open it. You can also use the power button, which has the same effect as a double tap.

When you get a call you can swipe up to answer or swipe down to ignore. If you pick up, another swipe when you've finished the call will hang up. You can also dismiss alarms by swiping down, without having to open the cover or unlock the phone.

Text messages, missed calls and emails are all represented by Lite Brite-style icons. The screen is bright enough that it's easy to read in the daylight, and it switches off automatically after a few seconds to save battery power.

It's a useful feature if you're constantly checking your phone for missed messages or the time, but the front cover can get in the way when taking pictures; if you'll primarily be using the phone for photos you may want to find a bumper case or gel cover instead.

The Dot View case is available in black, blue, green, orange and red. You can buy one from MobiCity, although it costs a whopping £35. That's a lot to ask for a plastic case with no internal electronics, however much protection it provides.

As is par for the course in a 2014 flagship phone, the HTC One (m8) is running the latest 4.4 KitKat version of Android. The latest iteration of HTC's own Sense user interface sits on top; that means reskinned icons, a selection of device-specific apps and the Blinkfeed news reader, which is just a swipe away from the home screen. Blinkfeed is now much easier to scroll through now everything is presented in one long list, rather than by pages at a time, letting you get Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+ updates in bite size chunks without jumping into the apps themselves. You can also add a selection of diverse news sources including the Guardian, Bloomberg, Designed for Living, Deadline, Autoblog and Vice.

The Phone, Messages and Mail apps have all received Sense makeovers, and HTC insists on including its own Browser app rather than let Google's Chrome take centre stage, but otherwise this latest version of Sense is refreshingly minimal. The Settings app is cleanly laid out and easy to navigate, while the pull-down notification and quick settings menus feel a lot like vanilla Android.

Only HTC's Music, Gallery, FM Radio and TV apps feel radically different. They are all presented beautifully, although we were surprised at some of the feature omissions; you can't custom sort your images in the Gallery app, or manually edit your MP3 tags or album art in the Music app. The TV app is the most welcome inclusion, as it lets you use the IR blaster built into the top of the phone to control your home cinema system. It learns the IR signals based your brand of TV, set-top box or AV amplifier, so most models should be supported. You can also use it to check TV listings for Freeview, Virgin, BT Vision or Sky packages.

Curiously, HTC plans to make some of the currently m8-exclusive apps available to other Android handsets through the Google Play Store. This would let the company fix bugs and add new features without having to release an entirely new Android ROM, hopefully speeding up the update process. The first two will be Blinkfeed and Zoe, but they won't be arriving until later this year.

Also new to Sense 6.0, and in particular the m8, are gesture-based commands. You can wake the phone with a double-tap, swipe left when the screen is off to jump straight to Blinkfeed, or turn the phone horizontally and press the volume key to instantly launch the camera. HTC has added an extra chip dedicated to these sensors, so it shouldn't drain battery life by constantly employing the main CPU.

HTC has also added a microSD card slot to the HTC One (m8), letting you add up to 128GB of extra capacity to the 16GB or 32GB of internal storage (depending on the model). Unfortunately Google's revised permissions in Android 4.4 make it a bit harder to edit or move the files saved to external storage, but anyone that uses their smartphone as an MP3 jukebox or portable video library will still appreciate its inclusion.

The m8 is powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 801 processor, which seems to have made its way into almost every flagship smartphone in 2014 so far. The quad-core chip runs at 2.3GHz and is paired with 2GB of RAM, which translates to incredibly fast performance. Even with Sense 6 running on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, the phone felt incredibly responsive, loading apps quickly and drawing image-heavy websites like BBC News and The Guardian with no noticeable lag or slowdown. This translates to impressive benchmark scores too; the m8 managed 662ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, making it the fastest Android-powered smartphone we've fully tested to date when it comes to web browsing. The Adreno 330 GPU is also more than adequate for playing any game in the Google Play Store today; it played demanding 3D titles like Real Racing 3 smoothly and scored 20,465 in the 3DMark Ice Storm test.

We expected this power to come at the expense of battery life. The HTC One (m8) has a 2,600mAh battery, which is slightly larger than the original One, but the larger screen and faster chipset could have easily meant less time between recharges. Thankfully, the m8 proved to be a frugal performer, lasting 13 hours 28 minutes in our video rundown test. That's a significant improvement over the original One, which lasted a mediocre 8 hours 32 minutes, but still falls behind Sony's Xperia Z2, which lasted more than 16 hours. HTC has added two battery saving modes, which we'll be testing throughout the week to see how battery life improves when the CPU is kept in check.

CONCLUSION

HTC has played it safe with the HTC One m8; it isn't a radical departure from the HTC One, but makes all the necessary upgrades in order to compete with other flagship handsets in 2014. It improves on the original in every way, so is deserving of a Best Buy award. Even so, it commands a top-end price, with networks asking at least £35 for a two year contract, and SIM-free you'll be looking at £530. With the Samsung's Galaxy S5 due to arrive in less than two weeks, we'd suggest waiting for the inevitable comparisons, that said if you prefer the metal body of the HTC One (m8), there's nothing to hold you back from buying one today.