The HTC One (M8) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Joshua Ho on March 26, 2014 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Mobile
- HTC One
Video
Since the rear facing camera only has a 4MP sensor resolution, there’s no support for 4K video recording - the maximum supported video resolution is 1080p. The available video modes are: 1080p30 (20Mbps High Profile H.264), 1080p60 (also 20Mbps High Profile), slow motion (720p) pand HDR video.
The camera preview in the video modes is pretty good. I noticed some dropped frames when recording 1080p30 but nothing substantial. The preview window when recording HDR video definitely dropped frames, to the point that it was fairly distracting. The resulting video itself was consistent in frame rate but not smoothly responsive to changes in dynamic range.
Extreme Power Saving Mode
This is a feature that seems to be all the rage these days. HTC now includes support for an Extreme Power Saving Mode that can be manually or automatically set to turn on when your battery reaches 20%, 10% or 5% remaining capacity. In the Extreme Power Saving mode you’re locked out from all but five apps (phone, messages, HTC Mail, HTC Calendar and Calculator ). The display brightness is clamped to 170 nits and max CPU/GPU frequency is limited to 1.2GHz and 320MHz, respectively. All four cores remain capable of being plugged in. Background data is also restricted - only SMS/MMS and phone calls will come in automatically. Emails need to be manually refreshed, and all other apps are quit upon entering the mode. The sensor hub is powered down, which disables features like the Motion Gestures and Pedometer.
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The Extreme Power Saving Mode features a large, simplified UI. The 5-inch display is evenly divided into large touch targets for each of the five apps as well as a button to exit the mode. The notification shade is disabled as well. You’ll still get alerts for things like open WiFi networks, but you’ll have no way to join/dismiss them while in this mode.
HTC claims up to 15 hours of standby time on the new One when running in Extreme Power Saving Mode (with 5% battery remaining). I still haven’t devised a good battery life test for these modes but I plan on measuring screen on standby time as soon as I get an opportunity to do so.
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hangfirew8 - Friday, April 4, 2014 - link
In summary, many of these items were addressed in past reviews, but were not in this review... and THAT is depressing.Hopefully this is just a transitional issue and AT will cover more technical detail again in the future. This is still one of the best M8 reviews on the Web, but sadly that is not a high bar.
Human Bass - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
The cel seems great...but 4MP Camera is way too low. Camera sensors already evolved enough to perform quite good with 8MP with very little noise. And it seems they forgot that when you have more MPs, you can actually chose to go lower. Im sure the Galaxy 5 camera will perform incredbly well at 8 or 4MP if I am in an enviroment that noise worries me more than resolution.deskjob - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
Great review. It was surprisingly to see the significant improvement in battery life between the S600 and S801, or even the the S800 and the S801. Now imagine if HTC bucked its trend of putting smaller than average batteries in its flagship! Come to think of it, the Butterfly S is probably just as tall as the M8, and it packs a 3200mah cell. That would be yummy.M9 wishlist - 3200mah+ battery cell, 8MP ultrapixel rear shooter with Nokia level OIS, S805 (or whatever comes after that), even louder and better stereo speakers and DACs for headphones. Keep the microSD!
Bonus material - somehow fit all that in the OG One's dimension! Water/dust resistant would also be cool and actually useful.
In the mean time, I will continue to rock the OG One...
asaini007 - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
I notice that it says the M8 has DDR3 RAM here (LPDDR3). But every single other site I've read claims it has DDR2 (for example http://goo.gl/JeDTgQ) Am I missing something?Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
HTC's original reviewer's guide incorrectly stated DDR2, they updated it to DDR3, but there's LPDDR3 inside.JacksonSparks - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
Hey Anand, your old pal Jackson here. Spot on review: I just got a sweet 2 for 1 deal from Verizon with $100 bill credit. Bottomline, that's two of these beauties for $160 and a 2 year contract. I don't see anyone beating out Verizon's coverage and reliability anytime soon, I am happy with my first smartphone purchase ever.asaini007 - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
As usual, love the detail of the AnandTech review... However, I'm wondering why things such as radio performance/call quality and speaker (BoomSound) performance are not analyzed?asaini007 - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
Never mind, after reading the comments I've seen this question has been addressed. But I'm still wondering about the RAM - is it DDR2 or the faster DDR3?sferrin - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
Please God, tell me they ditched the abominable Blink Feed. I went from an EVO with 7-screens and multiple scenes to 5 screens with one unusable due to Blink Feed.thedenti5t - Thursday, March 27, 2014 - link
Blinkfeed is there but you can remove that garbage