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HTC One (M8) Review

2014-04-04
what's up everyone John rent from TechnoBuffalo here it's a full review for you of the latest flagship from HTC this is the brand new HTC One m8 I'm using it for quite a while and ready to share my thoughts and help you guys decide whether that belongs in your pocket for the next two years go and get started but I deal with all my reviews I want to give a disclaimer I use this as my daily driver for nine and a half days most of my times with the International Edition although I did test using an AT&T model as well the International one is tested using an 18 t SIM card here in Southern California Todd Hazleton who wrote the written portion of the review if you want more detail on anything I'm talking about hit the link down below to go check that out let's jump right in with call quality it's always how I start my reviews especially when you think with the metal phone and be a bit of worried that maybe antennas aren't gonna work so well you're holding the phone wrong for example no issues at all with call quality again tested with AT&T network in Southern California so your results might vary but no drop calls at all call Claude's absolutely awesome call quality at new HTC One is as good if not better than the last generation which is to say it's pretty baller alright so for this review I'm gonna break it down into six categories that I think are gonna cover the most salient points for the majority of consumers looking to pick the sucker up we're gonna talk about design software screen camera performance and intangibles obviously there a ton more we could talk about but I think those six can best sum up a phone so even guys a quick speck refresh case you forgot what's packed inside of this tiny little body it's a 5-inch screen in 1920 by 1080 you can do quick math it's a 441 PPI protecting it is a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 powering it is a 2.3 gigahertz pretty beastly Snapdragon 801 processor though if you're in Asia that'll be bumped up to 2.5 gigahertz 2 gigs of RAM either 16 or 32 gigs now has expandable storage up to 128 on the back we'll talk a lot about this the duo camera of HTC's for ultra pixel camera on the front is a 5 megapixel wide-angle lens 802 11 ABG and AC at 2.40 and 5 gigahertz 2600 milliamp hour battery NFC and available in a few colors gunmetal grey glacier silver and amber gold now with all that out of the way let's finally jump into the review let's start with design I think some of the best designs for flagships in the industry their build quality matches Nokia and Apple and that's some seriously lofty praise the design on the original HTC one is classic cold metal and gently rounded edges industrial feel great display amazing speakers all waiting for a film that felt really good in the hand the One m8 is an evolution of that design and that's not half bad it's got 20% more metal they act as a plastic ring around the outside of it making the aluminum now wrap around the edges the result is exquisite if not a bit slippery I think some sort of texture would have really helped I haven't dropped the phone yet but I definitely feel like I could very very soon I wasn't a big fan of the power button on the original it felt small and kind of hard to depress HTC fix that on the m8 making it bigger and way easier to find builing with your finger like this the larger screen size make it look a bit more rectangular but the rounded edges you know make it look if you traced it very much like a galaxy there's a theme here with the phone the original HTC One felt good this one feels better virtually everything over the original HTC One or m7 is improved here the biggest improvement for me though I think is the death of the really really bad capacitive buttons original HTC One I'm usually a big fan of actual buttons I've talked about in future videos but the odd place got either side HTC logo coupled with the logo not serving as an actual button was absolutely maddening now we've got actual honest on-screen buttons and I know a few you were concerned they take up too much space on the bottom that's usually my issue with on-screen button but suffice to say it's way better than the alternative that we had on the original the moral here though is that's one of the best if not the best design phones on the market alright so next let's talk about software so it's no secret HTC is really squarely up against Samsung particularly the Galaxy s5 in this generation of phones I think Samsung takes the approach that they'll throw a ton of new features at you and hope there's maybe one or two or three that really like I think HTC takes a different approach they really use features I think they feel that you're gonna use the most and everything else is kind of secondary and the best thing I can say about sense 6 it kind of gets out of its own way without making your experience all about Sense features they're there when you need them or want them blink feeds been improved they've now allow for feats virtually any topic including I'm just saying Tech and Buffalo specifically just don't that out there arguably the best feature of blinkfeed though now is that it can be turned off if you don't want it and not just exiled to a home screen you don't actually use all that often I will say the blink feeds are kind of a nice little time waster and does work as advertised so I like a unified inbox but really used gmail on Android I'm usually on canine or another third-party email app I think HTC's default email clients actually one of the most elegant options out there but as much time as I use email this is really really important to me sense six also brought motion controls ways to open the camera app just by moving the screen in conjecture at how you pick it up the most useful of which though is when you answer a call you just pick it up put it your ear and answers it to neat and it works most of the other motion controls I didn't really use except for one that seems heavily influenced by LG's and that's the knocked feature double tap the screen to wake it up super useful works great at least start international unit on the 18 T model we are using only worked about 70% of the time if you don't like that home button placement getting them to use it just double tap the screen since 6 is the nicest skin or custom UI out there hands down it's definitely an evolution over 5 but a really welcome change let's go from software to screen the screen here is pretty standard 1080 stuff there's nothing revolutionary just a beautiful functional screen for those m7 owners you've had a weird tint with kind of a bluish color there's no such tent here at all on the new HTC One m8 outdoor visibility sometimes an issue is also pretty much improved but you still need to turn the brightness all the way up to see it but you will be able to see it the jump to a 5-inch screen I think serve the phone very well video games and text all look awesome but this day and age it's kind of hard to find a really bad screen than a good one so screen is pretty decent and works well on the new HTC One next let's jump into camera all right let's just get the big elephant the room out of the way here the duo camera on the back HTC did a really awesome job with the four megapixel branded ultrapixel camera on the original HTC One or m7 the biggest complaint a lot of users had however it was that it didn't perform that well in really bright light situations the photos were of such low resolution you could actually do him in and crop the photo HTC tried to address when those issues this time around but also ignored the other one completely still it even added more functions though so the camera is much better in bright light situations but it's still not perfect and that's because HTC said it chose a better sensor this time around also the phone autofocus and snaps photos really really fast point three seconds so you can set off rapid-fire pictures much quicker than before as for the megapixel count though you're still stuck with only four megapixels to work with and that means ooming and cropping still yield crummy photos I don't care if they call it mega or ultra pixels so that could be able to do much with the zooming their secondary duo camera lens is capable of pulling in all the depth data on a photo so the HTC One m8 knows that objects from the foreground the background and then you said information to blur out photos and add sort of the bokeh effect that you see usually find in DSLRs so the feature called G focus is not perfect but it does work better than other phones that come to this in the past like the Xperia Z ones or Nokia's refocus app HTC is also tatting the smart dual LED flash it works well it's really solid instead of just blowing out subject with bright light it adjusts itself to make sure the skin tones and other colors to look accurate we first saw this tech used on the iPhone 5s and we're truly well here on the HTC One m8 too the camera UI is still super fluid easy to use but you see removed the Zoe function from the default app and put in another setting that's because the depth camera doesn't really work with Zoe's if you open the Zoe camera however you can still record Zoe's snap photos and even record longer videos you can even pause the video then resume filming right where you left off again though photos snaps in this mode don't have depth data it seems silly but that's just how it ends sensor works HTC is going to release a new Zoe apt a lot of people to collaborate and create multi user highlight reels and I can't wait for its launch oh it's not out yet however so I can't talk about it finally though the selfie guy the front-facing camera on the front works really really well and I love the wide-angle aspect HTC put from earlier handsets like the one m7 and the butterfly images are far better too because it shoots five megapixels this time around and say a two megapixel shots on the previous generation so overall though if you're chasing megapixels then look for another phone HTC One m8 still takes great shots and I've really enjoyed performance at the camera save for some of the lower res shots also lack of opto and the stabilization might be an issue for some folks but for me once you pictures of my kids are out and about the camera works really well and performed pretty awesome next let's jump into performance Lisbon it's fast between the Snapdragon 801 two gigabytes of ram anything from multitasking to games will be super easy the best thing I can say about the power here is that I never noticed it which is to say I was never aware of and you slow down and for me a phone that gets out of its own way and lets me do what I want to do without sort of slowing down is sort of worth a spot in my pocket but because I do like to give a quadrant score I know it's not always the best way to score a phone but I do use it through all my phone so it's sort of a constant there got a pretty beastly score of twenty two thousand five hundred so yeah really really really fast phone next let's jump to intangibles so I was really worried about battery life 2600 milliamp hours is not huge I will say though HTC did a killer job managing battery I guess pretty much every Android phone I use with my usage I'm usually around 30 to 40 percent by end of the day with this one I was close to fifty to sixty percent which is absolutely incredible and I take my phone off the charger use around six thirty I've got about maybe four hours of phone calls usually it's on Wi-Fi at the office or the house goes back on the charger around 11 o'clock I've got maybe twenty or thirty minutes of video watching some games on their heavy social media to email apps playing in every five minutes so a lot of use it's that's really impressive heg did a really good job of battery life they also added battery savings mode that actually shuts down all three functions and vast increases battery life even more you get down to that dreaded five ten percent level they also listen to consumers and added a microSD card slot which for some might be a reason just alone to upgrade and of course those killer front-facing speakers they lost the beats logo on the back they added actually 20% on sounds and I wish I could show you or let you hear the sound sounds like coming out of this but it's not gonna translate over video into your speakers but it sounds really really good if you thought the speakers on original HTC one sounded awesome these sound even better and that's saying a lot all right so let's finally break this down what's the final score on the new HTC One m8 it gets a really really solid nine I love this phone and I would happily sign a two-year deal for it which is not something I say very often it's a perfect example of skinned Android at its best if you're looking at the best Android phone on the market right now this is absolutely the best one to pick up and you can compare this with the Nexus 5 I think you're gonna get a really really solid device of course a Galaxy s5 is coming very soon so competition is gonna get fierce but worry not if you want to pick up HD sees latest it's gonna serve you well for the next year and beyond you guys are watching hope you to hear your thoughts leave in the comments right down below please give video a thumbs up it was appreciated of course check us out at TechnoBuffalo conflation greatest tech news and again if you want to see Todd's full written review it goes into more detail linked to that it's going to be a write down below black what's up everyone thank you for watching that video if you want to see more the latest and greatest tech news you can subscribe to our main TechnoBuffalo channel by clicking the button right down below my pants region or click on the buttons to your right to see more videos
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