Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HTC One M8 Review!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the long-awaited full review of the brand new htc one m8 [ Applause ]. So really, when you’re talking about the one m8 from htc last year’s m7 was a killer in terms of design, and when you compare it to its feature, flagship rival from samsung the galaxy s5, they actually have basically identical internal specs, which means the design and the Physical way, it feels, in the hand, is more important than ever, and there literally couldn’t be a bigger difference between the two, so i’ll be comparing them in a separate video later. But if you watch any of the promo material for the m8 you’ll notice, it’s all about that design and the build quality and the material choices. And that’s really where this phone excels.
That’S its highlight and it’s the same material we have of the old htc one. But it’s obviously a little bit bigger a little bit more round and in a few different colors that are obviously inspired by some close competition. So this we have here is the silver m8 and now, like i said it’s more rounded and htc likes to boast a certain stat that the old htc one exterior was made of 70 metal, and this new one m8 is 90 metal and that’s true, but because Of this change, i actually think the old one fit better in the hand, see the sides of the phone were flat and sure, that’s you know the polycarbonate not metal, but it gave you an edge like something to actually grab onto while holding the phone. It was flat the new htc one rounds this off with more metal. So, yes, it is now you know 90 metal versus 70, but now there’s no edge to hold on to it’s just a slippery smooth, anodized aluminum all the way around the phone, and also since this phone is a bit larger to accommodate that bigger five inch display Bigger than last year’s the whole chassis is a bit bigger, and that makes it a little bit harder to reach that top power button, which is moved from the left side to the right side on the top of the device. But if we’re being honest here, i think the power button is in the wrong place entirely.
I think it should be on the right side of the phone where it’s easier to reach with one hand, especially for people with smaller hands, but at least it’s a little bit better than last year. But one thing that’s not in the wrong place. At least to me is the headphone jack it’s on the bottom of the phone here, and that is where i like it.
Also. The whole top of the phone is an ir blaster, so you can turn on and off your tv with an included app and on top of all that there is expandable storage in this sealed phone. So there’s a tray on both the right and left side of this phone.
The left side is where you put your sim card, but the right side will fit and support microsd card up to a 128 gigs 128 gigabytes. That is ridiculous and you know what i’ll drop 128 gig micro sd card link in the description, if you don’t believe me very useful for storing movies or apps or music and stuff offline. Now i am a tall person and i use big phones because i have big hands, but still even such a tall phone because of that back material being so slippery. It’S a little bit weird to hold and i definitely find myself using two hands to hold it. A lot of times, but really because of that power button placement, there’s a lot of movement going on in the hand, and i really would have rather had it on the side of the phone.
But overall, it’s obvious that this is designed to be a premium feeling phone and i think it definitely accomplishes that a lot of people are going to hear the speakers and immediately think wow. That’S really nice! A lot of people are going to see the display and immediately think wow. That’S really nice and just feeling this phone next to something like a galaxy s5 or an iphone or an lg, g3 uh. It’S gon na feel very different in the hand and that’s very important to people in the store when they’re about to buy it and then, when they’re, using it.
Now. As long as we’re talking about hardware, there’s a certain feature on the back of this phone that people just can’t stop talking about, and that is the camera or the dual cameras on the back. Htc got a lot of feedback last year with the old htc ones. Camera that ultra pixel camera a lot of positive, but also a lot of negative in terms of the photos that it took and the features that you got out of it, but htc decided to go ahead and keep that ultra pixel camera.
So it’s still a four megapixel sensor on the back with that main element and then they went ahead and added some stuff in uh subtracted some stuff out. Obviously so it’s worth going in depth taking a look at this camera, so in terms of specs here we’re looking at another four megapixel camera, dubbed the ultra pixel camera. Again this year, a two-tone led flash similar to the iphone 5s and a secondary two megapixel depth sensor to keep it simple, and this sensor is used for a couple of interesting software effects. We’Ll talk about the system is called duo. Camera now, notably missing that we saw in the m7, is optical image stabilization, so the camera software, the interface which you can get to just by rotating the phone sideways and tapping that volume button, is quite nice, simple, very clean, very intuitive and ridiculously fast, like it’s Very, very, very fast, focusing and fast taking shots. It’S the closest thing i’ve experienced to instant shutter on any android device.
I love that and there’s some flexibility when taking regular shots with this manual mode, which lets you manually change iso and exposure and actually save those settings as a custom camera. If you want so there’s a lot you can do here. The software is a nice blend between simplicity and capability, like you can really control a lot. If you know what you’re doing or you can just leave it alone and take nice shots in auto, and then there is the duo camera so after you’ve taken a shot and you open it up in the gallery. You’Ve picked your shot and you hit that edit button. You see a couple of effects along the bottom and these are called the duo camera effects and these will appear when your shot is compatible.
So the most well-known one is called u-focus which lets you tap. The part of the photo you want in focus and it’ll use software algorithms to blur the rest of the photo and try to reproduce a natural bokeh that you would get from a really nice camera or some nice glass now to the untrained eye. This can look pretty nice, especially on the phone’s smaller screen, but i know that they can keep working on it and making it better since they’re updating it through the play store, but a lot of times, you’ll find the effect looks pretty artificial and sometimes it just Doesn’T work at all, i mentioned the photo being compatible before i found that you have to be very careful when you use this focus effect. Your photo needs to have a very obvious subject and a very obvious background, but you’ll need to be far away enough that when you take your photo, everything is already in focus so that it can select what’s in focus after the fact. So if you do this right, it’ll make for the best eu focus effect after the fact.
But if you get too close, where the background is naturally blurred already you’re never going to get it back by clicking on it and it looks terrible. So you really have to take an obvious foreground and background photo to get this to work. Now, of course, there are some other effects. Uh foregrounder is pretty cool lets. You add effects to only the background to really isolate the subject or dimension plus, which uses that extra depth information from the second sensor to make this trippy 3d image that responds to the gyroscope of the phone again really cool stuff.
That looks okay on the phone. But really not that great anywhere else. Now, when it comes to the actual photo quality of the photos it takes. There are some really strong characteristics of a photo from the m8 that you can see like a mile away. One really poor dynamic range.
It either crushes the darks or blows out the highlights like every time. Two is a pretty nice, but also pretty dull exposure, sometimes underexposed. It really doesn’t like taking an image and making it too bright, but also tends to have under saturated colors and three is the resolution. Obviously it’s coming in at just four megapixels, which is of course not terrible, but it means that the front-facing selfie camera fun fact is actually a higher resolution coming in at five megapixels for those super detailed, instagram selfies. So, overall verdict with the camera on this guy is it’s pretty good? It’S okay, uh again those four megapixel photos.
They’Ll, look fine on your display on your phone and they’ll. Look fine sending it to the web as long as you’re, not viewing it uh blowing up huge as long as you’re, not printing it if you’re not looking at it on a 4k display, if you’re not zooming in at all. It looks fine and a lot of those effects again will look really cool, because you can’t see that it’s only four megapixels, but if you’re looking, if you’re a photo enthusiast, if you really inspect pixel peep those photos a lot and you do a lot of editing And share them on more than just the web you’re going to want to check out some of the 8 12 even 16 megapixel photos on cameras like the galaxy s3, s5 and note 3 and others so definitely not the best camera on the market.
But it’s certainly decent mid-range, i would say – and i would love to have optical image stabilization back anyway, there’s a bit to be said about the software. Besides the camera software, this is htc sense, 6 on top of android 4.4, and i think it’s my favorite skin on top of android right now. Now don’t get me wrong. I still love stock android and i would still take that any day of the week and i have a lot to say about the google play edition of this phone, but this version of htc’s software sense 6 is the least obtrusive. Yet it really feels like an adjustment to android rather than a layer on top of it. Performance is also excellent throughout. Obviously, since this thing is powered by top-notch hardware, top-notch graphics, opening and closing apps and flipping through your daily user interface, super quick everything is very, very responsive and you probably expect that and it looks kind of nice like i said it feels like an adjustment to Stock android one nice touch.
I’Ve noticed is the notification bar color changes depending on where you are in the phone. So if you’re on the home screen or the lock screen, the notification bar is clear, but in certain htc apps the color of the notification bar changes to match the app so in blinkfeed, for example, to the left of your home screens. It changes to green to match and it does it quite smoothly and all the other stock htc apps that come with the phone have their own color and they have that effect on the notification bar and i guess non-htc apps, just change it to gray so yeah. I’M liking that it’s a nice touch and little things like this are sprinkled here and there inside of sense, 6 to really spice up the design, and i do think it looks nice also htc stepped up the display size so we’re looking at a five inch 1080p Display here now, instead of 4.7, and that gives us on-screen buttons for sense six to work with so your software home back and multitasking button, and you can also swipe up to get to google now like on a nexus. Unfortunately, they kept that chin bar on the phone with the htc logo on it, but i’ve been told by a few that they needed to keep the device this tall to fit all the components, including those massive beautiful boom, sound speakers. In fact, let’s talk about the speakers, let’s talk about them.
They are awesome they’re, the best. Why aren’t they standard actually is my question. They make every single other phone, literally every other phone sound like crap. Honestly, you can’t get much better of an audio experience than a phone than this.
You get a much more immersive gaming experience. I actually enjoy watching youtube videos and listening to music on this phone. The alarm clock is ridiculously loud in the morning, which i guess is also good, and the drivers are so big and so far apart, they actually get a bit of a stereo effect. When things move across the screen in a good movie, it’s brilliant.
I love it. So i have nothing bad to say about the speakers other than the fact that they are so big that they make the phone really tall and htc has also come up with a way to combat the phone’s tallness. Since the power button is kind of hard to reach, they come up with a few ways to turn the display on, without ever touching that awkwardly placed power button. So this stuff might remind you of lg’s flagships, so you can double tap the phone when it’s upright to turn the screen on. That’S nifty, you can swipe down when the screen is off and that will start voice calling which unfortunately sucks at recognizing voices. It’S not.
Google recognition, but it’s there and it works. You can swipe left to bring your home screen up. So, if you’re in an app or something – and you swipe left from the off screen, it’ll bring you right home again. It always goes to your home screen and same with swiping right that’ll always bring you to blinkfeed wherever you are so again, you could be in an app or doing something uh and if you have your screen off and you swipe right, you’ll get ready to blink Feed, lastly, you can swipe up and just that’ll bring you to just wherever you were last. So if you were in an app or your home screen wherever you were and you swipe up you’ll be brought right back to that screen. You left off at so with all this knowledge in theory, you’ll never need to touch the power button again, except to turn the screen off. So htc is doing some really nice stuff with sense, including pulling a motorola and making a couple of them like the gallery and the dot view case functionality available in the google play store, which can be updated really quickly and for free. Now all that being said, i do have the google play edition of the one m8 in-house so thumbs up. If you want to see a separate video review of that, but a lot of these features from sense.
Six that are moved to the play store will also be available on the google play edition, which is why i have a lot to say about why the google play edition is probably going to be my most used phone uh, i’m really liking. The google play edition. Htc one m8, but if you’re in it for the sense features you’re probably going to want to get the traditional one. Another thing i was impressed with with this phone was the battery life. Now it is a sealed back phone. You can’t get into this and swap out the battery, but it’s got a sealed in 2600 milliamp hour battery, it’s a little bigger than the old htc one.
The old hdc1 didn’t have the best battery life in the world, but this thing is great: it is a power sipper uh. I would not have any problem recommending going a whole weekend with this phone with light use. I’Ve gotten two full days to use out of this phone and it’s definitely a very light battery user when you’re not really using it a whole ton, and even when that 5-inch 1080p display is on and you’re gaming and you’re using it a lot, it doesn’t burn Through battery, like some other phones, i’ve used, so this is one of the best batteries in the market, even though it’s not a 3 000 milliamp hour battery or 3300 milliamp hours.
It’S still great i’ll show you some of the usage stats. I’Ve gotten out of it, but typically i can get through a full day pretty easily. With this phone i haven’t been able to wear it down in a typical 24 hour use period, so very impressive there and something else. That’S even i guess. Like a small thing, i usually don’t use auto brightness on phones. I usually manually control the brightness because they tend to have some weird sensitivity problems, but this is one of the first ones in a while that i’m okay, with the way it uses auto brightness outside turns it all.
The way up inside turns it down to a comfortable level, i’m happy with the auto brightness on this phone. I usually don’t even have to talk about that. So overall i got ta say this phone has a lot of good things going for it, and i’ve enjoyed the hell out of using it. For the time that i have and like i said, i do have a lot to say about the google play edition of this phone. So again, that’s probably going to end up being an entire separate review video. But for now i got to say this is one of the best phones.
You can buy, go in a store, try it out, you’re, probably going to like holding it, and that’s going to be a good reason to buy it by itself, because the specs are so similar to other flagships so check it out. I don’t have any reservations about this phone, even if you aren’t a huge fan of the camera, it takes good enough shots that this is probably one of the best phones. You can buy right now. It’S the 1m8 thanks for watching guys and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .