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
Battery Life
The new One features an integrated 3.8V 2600mAh battery (9.88 Wh), a 13% increase in capacity compared to the previous model. The battery comparison isn’t that simple however. The M8 has a larger display (5” vs 4.7”) but it also has a higher performing and more power efficient SoC (Snapdragon 801 vs. 600). To find out how the new One stacks up against its predecessor, we turn to a mix of old and new battery life tests to help better characterize the device.
We’ll start with our standard browser based battery life tests. Keep in mind here these tests are as much about replicating a particular CPU profile as they are about loading specific web pages in order.
We saw a substantial gain in battery life with Snapdragon 800, and 801 extends that even further. For the same, relatively light (yet constant) workload, the M8 improves battery life over the M7 by as much as 71%. On WiFi the advantage drops to only 38%, but we’re still talking about absolutely huge generational gains.
A constant workload is only one part of the story though. More often than not, when you’re faced with faster compute you end up doing more. To see what the other extreme of battery life looks like I turned to two canned tests: BaseMark OS II and GFXBench 3.0.
I ran both of these tests under the same controlled conditions we always use, with all displays calibrated to 200 nits. BaseMark OS II runs through a bunch of CPU and storage benchmarks (basically the same tests used for the BaseMark OS II system and memory tests), as fast as possible, until the battery dies.
I like this benchmark as it gives us an indication of worst case battery life if you’re absolutely hammering the CPU (and storage) relentlessly.
Despite the faster CPU cores, the M8’s battery life actually goes up compared to M7. Here we’re really seeing the benefits of 801’s updated 28nm HPm process compared to the Snapdragon 600’s 28nm LP process.
GFXBench provides a similar test, with effectively uncapped performance (on today’s devices at least since we’re not hitting v-sync limits), but stressing the GPU instead of the CPU. Here we’re running the T-Rex HD benchmark, onscreen, until the battery dies.
This is the first and only test we’ve got here that shows a regression in battery life compared to M7. The M8 loses about 6% of runtime compared to the M7, despite having a larger battery. Now look at what happens if we look at performance at the end of the run:
Now the M8’s battery life regression doesn’t look so bad. You give up 6% of runtime but you get almost twice the performance compared to M7. Snapdragon 801 is just a huge upgrade compared to 600.
Charge Time
The M8 features a Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 enabled PMIC, which enables faster battery charge times through higher voltage charging. Unfortunately the in-box wall adapter is only Quick Charge 1.5 compliant so you'll only pull 7.5W from the wall. HTC expects to offer a Quick Charge 2.0 compliant power adapter later this year.
The M8's charge time is a bit slow compared to what we've seen from other devices with larger batteries.
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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