By default, your home screen is the BlinkFeed magazine view, which aggregates articles from around the Web and social network updates. For some reason, the app dock and Android soft buttons remain visible on top of displayed content. Swiping to the right brings you to a more familiar home screen, with only a single weather widget and a Google search box.
You can unlock the phone with a double-tap on the screen, which will come in handy if you don't like the power button placement. Swiping to the left will take you to BlinkFeed, swiping to the right will take you to the first home screen, and swiping upwards will just unlock the phone and take you to whatever you were doing last. With the phone on its side, you can just press either volume button to wake up directly into the camera. You can also drag any of the lock screen icons upwards to unlock the phone and launch that app.
The app drawer has a stark black background, and pages are separated vertically rather than horizontally. You can sort icons in alphabetical order, by date, or in your own custom arrangement. You can also choose between a 4x5 grid and a more spaced out 3x4 layout, though icon sizes don't change.
HTC also doesn't bundle very many apps. There's a Car Mode, which shows larger versions of the music controls, maps and phone dialler, as well as a Kid Mode that lets you restrict what a child can do when you give him or her your phone to play with. HTC also includes the 7digital music store, which is largely unusable in India; the Fitbit app, for users of Fitbit health bands; WeChat; Polaris Office 5; and a sketching app called Scribble.
The Television app uses the M8's infrared LEDs to control your TV, set-top box and home theatre receiver. The list of manufacturers included lots of Indian DTH and electronics brands, but channel guides are not available. In case your devices aren't supported, you can use their original remotes to program the M8 manually.
Very similar to
Samsung's Galaxy S5, there's a power saver mode as well as an extreme power saver mode. While the former adjusts settings such as the screen timeout and background data transfers, the latter essentially turns the M8 into a basic phone which only lets you make use the calling, text messaging and email functions. The mode isn't quite as minimalistic as Samsung's implementation, but you can choose to automatically trigger it when your battery drops below the 5, 10 or 20 percent charge level.
Dual camera
We couldn't wait to test the much-hyped dual-camera functionality. HTC doesn't say much about the specifications of the second camera, and indeed you can't record pictures or videos through it. It's much more of a sensor, and is included in order to add extra context to photos taken with the primary camera. You won't get stereoscopic 3D effects or photos, but you will be able to make some very neat edits, which aren't possible with regular cameras or even regular PC software.
HTC is also still sticking to its UltraPixel technology (and marketing), which eschews high pixel counts in favour of expanded sensors which capture more light per pixel. By ordinary metrics, that means the One M8's camera has a piddly 4-megapixel sensor compared to the 16 megapixels of its competitors, but in practice, there is merit to HTC's approach.
Photos taken by the M8 are surprisingly detailed and clear. Most remarkably, there's very little loss of detail and almost no visible compression when seen at full size, which cannot always be said for photos taken with phone cameras. However, we found that colours were very muted and dull, even in broad daylight. The M8 also emits a very loud chirping noise when it locks focus, which seems totally unnecessary.
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The M8 camera excelled while taking shots from a moving car. With a fixed aperture, shutter speed has to be reduced to avoid blurring when in motion, which automatically means less light is captured. We were able to take beautiful, crisp shots with the M8 automatically adjusting to speeds as high as 1/2860 of a second. Similarly, low-light performance was remarkable. The M8 captured decent amounts of detail and colour with just faint illumination, though we needed a steady hand.
The 5-megapixel front camera was a bit of a letdown, considering it's actually capable of taking larger photos than the rear one. Images weren't always well exposed, and there was a lot of compression. As far as video goes, 1080p is a big step down from 4K, which the M8's prime competitors offer. Video is quite clean and smooth, but not spectacular.
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The dual-camera tricks only come into play when editing photos. The possibilities are quite impressive, and make for excellent demonstrations, but after a while we're left wondering how often we'd actually use them. The most impressive is the copy/paste feature, which lets you extract people from backgrounds and rearrange them in other photos. This doesn't just mean you can paste one photo on top of another; even the target photo is analysed, and the person you're inserting can be between people and their backgrounds. Effectively, you get three layers, and can choose who is in front and who is behind.
Of course it isn't perfect, and a lot depends on the angle you shoot at. It also only works on photos with recognisable faces.Automatic selections work best with high-contrast backgrounds, but you can refine the selection area manually. The effect, when done right, can be quite amazing, but more often than not, it's just comical.
Other effects include selective defocus, which adds a fake depth of field effect. You just have to tap any part of the screen that you want to focus, and the rest blurs around it. Foregrounder is somewhat the same, but instead of a DoF blur, other effects such as motion blur or cartoon sketch filter can be applied.
The Seasons effect is the least interesting, since you'd have to save your photos as videos to capture the pattern of falling petals or snowflakes, which honestly looks very fake. Dimension Plus lets you tilt your photos around for a 3D effect, which again works only so long as subjects are the right size and distance.
Many of these features won't work if the secondary camera was obstructed when you took a photo. Clearly, that depth-sensing capability has been harnessed here, but we have to wonder if it's worth the cost, since everything feels quite gimmicky. We're not likely to use these effects often, once the novelty wears off.
Performance
This is our first opportunity to benchmark a device based on the new Snapdragon 801, since Samsung launched only the Exynos-based variant of its Galaxy S5 in India. While the Exynos has four high-powered and four low-powered cores, the Snapdragon has only four, but more powerful and running significantly faster.
The Galaxy S5 and the One (M8) showed different strengths, but more often than not, it was the M8 that came out on top. Qualcomm's advantage over other ARM-based processor vendors has so far been graphics, and we saw that continue to be the case despite Samsung's impressive work with its in-house processors.
Of course, there's HTC's High Performance Mode to be accounted for. There's no real way to be sure which devices are and aren't optimising performance for which benchmarks, and despite giving us the (slightly hidden) option to turn it on for all apps, there's no way to make sure it's off for the purpose of benchmark accuracy. We ran our entire suite of tests with High Performance on as well as off, and saw only negligible differences. This could mean that our scores are inflated, so we're choosing not to report individual numbers here.
Instead, it should suffice to say that the M8 is a phenomenally fast phone, with the fastest processor currently available. Games are incredibly smooth, high-def videos play flawlessly, and we only noticed slight lags when applying photo effects, which is probably very CPU-intensive.
HTC's BoomSound speakers also deserve a mention here. Music and movies were both rich and detailed. The volume doesn't go high enough to fill a room, but it's more than enough for a group of friends clustered around you.
Call quality was decent, and so was network reception in most areas. The battery lasted 10 hours, 5 minutes in our video loop test, which is pretty impressive.
Verdict
The HTC One (M8) is not a radical departure from last year's HTC One. It's a solid update, but isn't new or exciting, and definitely isn't worth upgrading to if you currently use any of last year's premium phones.
The M8's major competition will come from
Sony's Xperia Z2 and Samsung's Galaxy S5, both of which offer similar or better specifications. The M8 will have to rely on its premium build quality and camera gimmicks to appeal to buyers, and perhaps a price cut sometime mid-lifecycle. Meanwhile, Samsung and Sony are experimenting with (and making big noises about) waterproof bodies, heart rate sensors, 4K video recording, fingerprint readers, smart accessories, and much more. This is exactly the strategy that led HTC to
where it is right now, and it looks like history might well repeat itself.
Ultimately, despite being a fantastically crafted phone that works really well, the M8 will appeal only to those who either place a high value on design, or seriously dislike Samsung and Sony. We're less enthusiastic about the M8 than we are about the inevitable price cut the M7 will receive. HTC seriously needs a reinvention, and the One (M8) is not it.
Display
5.00-inch
Processor
2.5GHz
Front Camera
5-megapixel
Resolution
1080x1920 pixels
RAM
2GB
OS
Android 4.4.2
Storage
16GB
Rear Camera
4-Ultrapixel
Battery capacity
2600mAh
