However, its crowning achievement was last year's HTC One, also known as the M7. The phone's fantastic industrial design and anodized aluminum shell are just two reasons it remains one of my favorites to this day.
There's no mistaking the fact that the new One (aka the M8) inherited a lot of traits from its predecessor, including BoomSound speaker grilles, a curved back and horizontal stripes. After all, if it ain't broke, why fix it? And believe it or not, the phone is made from even more metal than last year's model: roughly 90 percent of the chassis is made from aluminum, compared to 70 percent for the M7. That means the phone no longer sports polycarbonate accents on the top, bottom and sides; instead, metal wraps all the way around until it reaches the display. Throw in some rounded corners and a brushed-metal finish on the back, and you've got yourself a beaut. Still, beauty is also in the eye of the beholder!
But questions my mind, is the device too fragile? I mean if I drop this phone, I don't think it can survive without a case or so!
So on the hardware side, the phone looks gorgeous unless you use a case for protection else you may have to use the HTC advantage once in a month!
HTC made some more changes too like the screen is now of 5 inch and the power button now sits on the top right!
Even better, it has a new neighbor: a memory card slot! Indeed, the microSD spot can take cards up to 128GB, which will come in handy since you can only get up to 32GB of internal storage on the new One. Turning to the bottom of the phone, you'll find the micro-USB QuickCharge 2.0 port and 3.5mm headphone jack, while the left side houses a slot for the nano-SIM card. Sadly, the charger that comes included in the box only supports QuickCharge 1.0, which means you'll need to pay for an optional accessory just to take advantage of the faster charge time.
As on last year's model, the panel looks sharp, bright and vibrant; viewing angles are wide and the display is easy to see in direct sunlight as long as you push the brightness up to 75 percent or higher.
The screen itself is protected by a slab of Gorilla Glass 3, which is, of course, designed to be scratch-resistant.
UNDER THE HOOD!
Under the hood, the M8 comes loaded with a 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset (it's 2.5GHz in certain regions), 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2,600mAh battery, dual-band 802.11a/ac/b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 with aptX.
Finally, one of the more curious hardware additions are the low-powered, alwaysl listening "Smart Sensors." Accelerometers are nothing new, but HTC's can be used by apps all day long without significant drain on the the battery (as they don't fire up the processor etc). As HTC's opened up the API for these -- dubbed HTC's Smart Sensor Hub -- app developers will be able to hook into this information directly!
These features make these new HTC really fast and competitive with other flagships out there, so it's going to be a really tough competition!
SENSE 6 UI.
The new HTC one comes with the new sense 6 UI which the HTC likes to call sixth sense which is pretty humorous as it doesn't predict the future or something, anyways the android version you get here is the latest android 4.4.2! These all upgrades will come to the existing one series users around summer!
As with most KitKat launchers, the M8 home screen feels more expansive because the status bar on top and virtual navigation bar on bottom are both transparent. You now have three soft keys representing buttons for back, home and recent apps which will allow you to take advantage of the full screen feature of KitKat!
Most Sense apps and features comply with specific shades depending on which color theme you choose (by default, BlinkFeed is green, for instance), but you can change to other themes if you like.
On Sense 6, HTC is following Google's lead by making several of its proprietary apps available on the Play Store. The gallery, Zoe app and Sense TV are the first ones that receive this treatment. This is a smart move on HTC's part: Now, the company can push out updates to individual Sense services anytime it wants, rather than having to bundle new features and bug fixes into a firmware update that can take weeks to roll out (even longer if you live in the US). If this strategy is a success, we'll likely see HTC do the same thing with even more apps in the future.
There's a new gesture feature called Motion Launch, with which we have something of a love/hate relationship. It takes Nokia's and LG's double-tap-to-unlock and expands upon the concept with swipe gestures. You can still double-tap to wake up the lock screen, but you can also swipe your finger in different directions to bypass the lock screen entirely and take you directly into specific functions (provided you don't have any security locks in place). Swipe up to go into the home screen; swipe right to access BlinkFeed; swipe left to launch the widget panel; and swipe down to activate voice dial for faster calling. If you want to take a picture, hold the volume rocker and lift the phone up in landscape mode. The do not disturb is not new but its nice to have one and the new htc one got it!
In theory, the only way you can trigger Motion Launch gestures is when the phone senses movement -- it can tell that you're picking up your phone and assumes that you're wanting to turn the phone on. In practice, however, the gestures were too sensitive; I could wake up the phone when the One was sitting on my desk, resting in my pocket and when my thumb was firmly planted motionless on the screen. I'd also really like to customize the gestures to take me directly into apps that I use frequently, like email. Let's give HTC credit where it's due, though: This new functionality is pretty clever, and it'll likely get even smarter with future software updates.
CAMERA.
The camera on the previous year HTC one was pretty good unless you don't wanna zoom in but let's see whether this time it is perfected even more or not!
First off, HTC is sticking to its UltraPixel philosophy. In a nutshell, the idea is to taake a physically large sensor and combine it with big pixels that are capable of gathering more light than standard-sized ones. Many smartphone cameras feature 1.1µm pixels, while the One proudly boasts a one-third-inch BSI sensor with 2µm pixels capable of absorbing 330 percent more photons. It also uses ImageChip 2 and a 28mm f/2.0 AF lens that helps grab even more light. HTC believes you don't need a high-resolution sensor to take great pictures, and as long as you don't need to zoom in on anything, the quality should remain near the top of its class.Here is a sample which uses the duo camera!
The sad part of the camera is that the OIS is gone, HTC replied on this that they needed more space for mechanical components! But it's not the end of the world,, the features that we are getting instead are faster auto focus, anti shake feature which are really helpful and you would probably fidget the OIS while using these features!
The M8 also features a dual-LED flash, which is designed to get rid of glare and make nighttime photos look more natural. This has been done in quite a few smartphones already, such as the iPhone 5s, but HTC's option is actually much brighter and produces more natural skin tones.
Along with Sense 6 comes a new user interface on the camera app. This version is streamlined with fewer options on top: videos, selfies, 360-degree pano shots (like Photo Sphere), dual-camera captures and Zoes are now all confined to separate modes that can be accessed on the lower-right corner. Each corner of the viewfinder has an icon (flash, settings, modes and gallery shortcut), and the only other UI element is the shutter button halfway down the right side. When you choose settings, you're presented with a bar of options along the bottom of the viewfinder. This includes ISO (up to 1600 on the M8), exposure, white balance, filters, random settings and scenes; the latter option lets you choose between no fewer than 11 scenes, including HDR, Night mode, manual, macro, sweep panorama and anti-shake, among others.
Manual mode reminds us of Nokia's fantastic camera app -- it brings up a whole new set of options along the bottom, and each one reveals a slider that lets you adjust white balance (you can customize temperature in Kelvins), exposure, ISO, shutter speed and focus. You can see the results in real time, so you don't have to worry about what the image is going to look like after you take the shot!
You might be wondering what's with the dual camera on the back? The dual camera does fancy like 3D imaging that we all were expecting but what it does is increase the quality of the photo at a much higher level and let's you edit your photo after the shoot is taken in much professional way like you can refocus objects (like on Nokia lumia phones) that are far away, lets you crop the whole subject from one photo to another! Basically the camera works now in a more professional way than before!
The quality of the images are obviously going to be exceptional and even from the front camera which is bumped up to 5mp wide angle view lens and can record full HD videos!
Here are some more samples!
When we compare the lumia 1020 with the new htc one, this was the result!
PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY LIFE!
The performance is obviously going to be really great with the specs I mentioned earlier that include a 2.3ghz snapdragon 801 processor (which is the latest until the 805 comes later this year!) , 2gb ram powered by adreno 330! The performance is going to be top notch with these specs as we expect from a 2014 flagship but its the battery life where the new HTC one really shines!
As much as I like power, I love battery life even more. The M8 comes with a 2,600mAh battery inside, which is 300mAh larger than last year's version. Before reviewing the phone, I predicted that we'd see roughly the same life on this model as we did the M7, primarily because of the larger display and more powerful processor with a higher clock speed but the case is different here!
The battery features of htc m8 are really and on moderate usage , the htc m8 can go all day with 30% left! This is really a breakthrough as in flagship, i never saw this battery life with this much size of battery!
TO SUM UP...
The new HTC one is remarkably one of the best phones of this year with the best specs and the best design and material used! However I wanted the metal to be not increased to 90% add this can create heading issues which I am not yet sure but there could be the issue of the phone slipping off your hands at times!
But still I would love this phone to shine in the market and you should definitely wait for this phone if you want the best experience with the best hardware!
SO I GUESS THAT'S IT FOR THIS TIME! HOPE YOU LIKED IT!
DO SHARE YOUR VIEWS TOO ON THE NEW HTC ONE IN THE COMMENTS SECTION OR CONNECT TO ME ON TWITTER @phonesoldier and facebook at www.facebook.com/phonesoldier!
