HTC One (M8) 2014 First Impressions
Hey everyone! This is Gabriel and I’ve had the time to take a look at the HTC One! I visited the rogers store and checked out both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S5. I also have a First Impressions post for the Galaxy S5, just click this here to get there. Just keep in mind that I only had like 5 minutes to try it so my opinion could change if I ever own one of them.
HTC One (M7) Left, MTC One (M8) Right
I had a chance to play with the gun metal color of the HTC One (because that was the only model I could play with) and the build quality is excellent. The design change from the previous HTC One is that it has a curvier edges and an almost full body aluminum body. Since the M8 uses an aluminum material on the side compared to the polycarbonate material on the M7, it does feel a little bit more slippery.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to properly hold the phone (because of the anti-theft strap attached to the phone), but I did touch the aluminum surface on the htc one. It felt particularly nice and a much more premium feeling compared to other competitions.
Damn thing in the way!
The size of the phone itself is pretty tall, and that is because it is a 5″ phone and it has 2 front facing speakers. The phone did look tall but it didn’t seem crazy tall to me when I compared with the Nexus 5 side by side. But then again, I’ve never tried to put the phone in my pocket because of the strap attached to the phone (Rogers will think I’m stealing it if I try to do it lol). Adding on a case will probably make the phone feel very tall, so keep that in mind.
There’s two cameras on the back which HTC likes to call it duo-camera. They are both 4.1 MP, but one has a big pixel size while the other has a small pixel size. The front facing camera is actually 5 MP which is a good thing because you can get some high quality selfie pictures…. But the decision to have a higher MP count on the front, rather than the rear camera is a strange decision…
HTC One Home Screen
As for the Software, HTC has skinned Android into an OS they like to call “Sense”. It’s their 6th iteration of Sense which is why the Marketing team likes to call it “Sixth Sense”. Nothing much changed from the previous Sense version. Icons, blinkfeed, launcher, settings, camera, gallary has a few changes here and there but you pretty much get the same experience. Even though nothing much changed, I personally like the experience. Keep in mind that I don’t like skinned version of android, but Sense is one of my favourite skinned OS.
One reason why I like Sense is the small details….like the color of the status bar changes based on which app you use. It follows the same color that the app currently uses. Status bar color changes blue when you open the messanger app or the status bar color changes purple when you use the gallery app. I really like the small detail HTC gave. Sadly, only HTC apps work, so any third party or google apps won’t work this way.
Status Bar Color changes based on which app you use
Other reasons why I like sense is the consistency throughout the UI. Icons, fonts, color seems to be consistent throughout the UI. The only problem is that a lot of 3rd party apps follow Google’s Holo UI, which makes whole UI inconsistent (which is why I dislike android skins). However, I really do like sense and I can easily recommend to people to try them out.
Double tap to turn display on
Since the phone is pretty tall and the Power button is location at the top of the device, some people might have trouble turning the phone on. So HTC took some of the ideas of LG and added their own touch gestures. Double tapping on the screen would turn on the screen. swiping right would get you to the home screen. Swiping to the left would get you to blinkfeed. There’s more and it works pretty well, as you can see from the gif on the left.
Sadly, I haven’t touched much on the camera or the battery life, so I can’t comment on much. Is it worth upgrading to the previous HTC One (M7)? I would think not. Nothing much changed other than a slightly enhanced hardware and software. I do like HTC One M8, but I kind of want a killer feature. So that is the end of this post. Thanks for reading guys, I’ll see you guys on the next one!
Hectagon 