HTC One M8 review: Still worth buying in 2017?

The HTC One M8 is now over three years old, but it’s still a very, very handsome smartphone. Is it still worth buying in 2016, though? Well, you can pick one up for as little as £60 “pre-owned”. You can also find resellers on Amazon UK selling new stock for just under £100.

If you need some inspiration, then click here to check out our guide to the best smartphones you can currently buy. Got your heart set on an HTC One M8? Then read on to find out why we loved it so much back in 2014. 

The HTC One M8 is a smartphone with a lot to live up to. Its predecessor, the HTC One, was our favourite smartphone until the Nexus 5 rolled up – and in this generation it has tough competition on its hands already, in the form of the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2. 

Can the M8 replicate its predecessor’s Herculean feat of rising to the top in this tremendously competitive market?

HTC One M8: Design

It may not surprise you to discover that, like its rivals, the new HTC One M8 is no radical overhaul. Instead, it takes the design of the One and refines it. Rather than matte silver, the new phone has a polished, dark gunmetal-grey finish, with an attractive brushed effect. It still has that smoothly rounded rear, but the sharp, chiselled edges have now been rounded off as well.

Since it sports a larger 5in, 1080p display, as well as a higher-capacity 2,600mAh battery, the phone is physically slightly bigger than the original One, but HTC’s engineers have managed to keep a lid on things; the M8 is only half a fingernail taller. HTC is keen to push design as a key selling point of the phone, and it’s succeeded in remaining ahead of its rivals in terms of looks.

From a practical point of view, we’re disappointed to see that the home, multitasking and back buttons have been shifted from beneath the screen into the display itself, eating into the usable screen real estate. The HTC One M8 also lacks dust- and water-resistance like the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S5 and the recently released Sony Xperia Z1 Compact.

However, it’s good to see that HTC has added a microSD slot to the new model; with the original HTC One – now renamed the One M7 – you were stuck with the storage you opted for at purchase. We also like HTC’s ingenious new Dot View case (£35 inc VAT). This allows light from the display to shine through a grid of pinpricks in the front cover, allowing the phone to display the time, weather and notifications through the flap in retro, dot-matrix style. It’s even possible to answer calls through the case without having to open it.

HTC One M8: Camera

Aside from the design, the most significant update is the Duo camera. Flip the M8 over and you’ll see two lenses – one that captures the main image and a smaller one that records spatial information.

This enables the M8 to add dramatic depth-of-field effects to your photos after they’ve been taken. The UFocus tool allows you to blur foreground or background detail, while the Foregrounder effect isolates the main subject by desaturating the background and adding a sketch filter to it. Dimension Plus adds an interactive parallax effect to pictures: tilt the phone around and the background changes position relative to the foreground subject, in a similar fashion to Apple’s parallax wallpapers.

Alas, in the majority of our test shots, these effects weren’t completely clean: we saw plenty of areas where background effects encroached on the foreground subject, and vice versa. It’s also too easy to inadvertently leave a finger covering the depth sensor, meaning you won’t be able to refocus the photo afterwards.

Still, for general snaps, the camera is more than satisfactory. It uses a 1/3in, 4.1-megapixel sensor with the same 2µm “UltraPixels” as before, and an f/2 aperture. Unlike the original One, there’s no optical image stabilisation, but photos actually look sharper and cleaner: in low light, there’s more detail and better control over noise, and in good light, there’s better judgement of exposure. The dual-colour, twin LED flash means taking snaps in a darkened pub lounge doesn’t result in ghost-white skin tones.

The lack of stabilisation leads to slightly shakier video footage, but more natural colours and crisper details make up for that. Overall, we’d say the M8’s rear camera is better than the Nexus 5’s, but it still can’t match the iPhone 5s’ or the Nokia Lumia 1020’s snappers.

The front-facing camera has been upgraded to a 5-megapixel unit, which produces surprisingly detailed self-portraits. HTC also adds an onscreen countdown timer to make capturing these shots easier. We’re not keen on the new facial Touch Up filters, however: the eye resizer, skin smoother and face narrower are crude and mostly result in making your pictures look worse.

HTC One M8: HTC Sense

The HTC One M8 runs the latest version of HTC’s proprietary UI, Sense 6, on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, and naturally this includes a number of customisations. First up is a feature that HTC calls Motion Launch, which lets you wake up the phone with various gestures.

A double-tap takes you to the lockscreen, while swiping up from the bottom takes you directly to your chosen homescreen. A swipe from the right opens the traditional Android desktop, complete with shortcuts and widgets, and swipes in from the top and left access voice-dialling mode and the HTC BlinkFeed interface respectively.

BlinkFeed itself has been updated so as to scroll continuously, rather than a page at a time. Blocks of colour now space out the items and give it a more airy feel, and it’s possible to search through feed items by keyword.

There are also now two power-saving modes: a standard one and an “extreme” one, which shuts down all but the essential apps and limits CPU speed, brightness and non-essential features. In this mode, you can access only one screen, which displays the time and shortcuts to the phone, SMS, email, calendar and calculator apps.

HTC One M8: Core hardware and specification

The M8 sports the very latest in mobile-processing grunt: a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, clocked at 2.3GHz, backed by 2GB of RAM. It’s blazingly fast, scoring 2,849 in the multicore Geekbench 3 CPU test and 29fps in the GFXBench T-Rex HD gaming test. These scores are slightly quicker than the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact, and a good distance ahead of our A-List smartphone, the Nexus 5. In practice, they indicate ultra-responsive performance all round, and super-smooth gaming.

HTC has also significantly boosted performance in the audio department, redesigning the forward-facing speaker chambers to produce even more volume than before – and it’s still distortion-free. Call quality is equally good, and wireless communications are comprehensive, including 4G, NFC and 802.11ac. The infrared transmitter remains in place from the previous model, so you can still use this phone to control your TV and set-top box.

HTC One M8: Display and battery life

The M8’s 5in display is not only bigger than the screen in the original One, it’s also punchier, with a contrast ratio of 1,687:1 compared with 1,202:1. It’s just as bright as before, making it a fantastic display that’s perfectly readable outside and inside.

The HTC One M8 also has a bigger battery, benefitting from a 300mAh boost, going from 2,300mAh to 2,600mAh. HTC claims that this, combined with improved component efficiency and the new battery’saver mode, can deliver a “40% increase” in overall battery performance.

That’s a little optimistic, but the M8 did perform well in our tests. While playing a 720p video with the screen set to 120cd/m[sup]2[/sup] (slightly below mid-brightness), capacity fell at a rate of 6.5% per hour. Streaming audio over 3G used up 3.8% per hour. Leaving the phone overnight in standby – but still syncing several accounts – consumed a miserly 0.3% per hour.

Those results place it only fractionally behind the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact, and with moderate use, employing the extreme power saving mode for the last 12% of capacity we were able to extract a full two days of use out of the M8.

You’ll need to watch your gaming habit, though. In the gaming portion of our battery test, at mid-brightness, the M8 chomped through a frightening 42.3% per hour.

HTC One M8: Verdict

The HTC One M8 is a better smartphone than last year’s One. It has improved cameras and software, the display is superb and the design is the best we’ve seen from a smartphone this year. At the moment, this is the best Android smartphone money can buy.

There are two key sticking points, however. The first is that its big rival, the Samsung Galaxy S5, will soon bring even more significant changes, including a new autofocus system for its camera, water- and dust-resistance and an even bigger battery, plus fingerprint and heart-rate sensors.

The second is that the Nexus 5 – although not as impressive across the board – costs a significant £230 less, SIM free, than the £530 M8. The HTC One M8 is a cracking smartphone, and is packed with useful and clever features, but if you’re on any sort of budget, it isn’t revolutionary enough to justify that £230 premium.

Second Opinion: Barry Collins on the HTC One M8

Forget the souped-up specs, the bizarre double camera and the rounded edges: as an owner of the original HTC One, the thing that really has me jealously eyeing up the M8 is that Dot View case. Since I don’t wear a watch, the ability to quickly tap on the phone’s case and see the time is surprisingly handy – as is the option to answer calls without flipping the case open.

Otherwise, I find the false depth-of-field effects produced by the new camera gimmicky, and having tried out the phone for myself I’ve noticed little difference in day-to-day performance – the original HTC One hardly wants for power, after all. Battery life does seem to be significantly better, though: after two-and-a-half days of admittedly light usage, the M8 is still just about clinging to life. I’ve never got my HTC One past a day and a half.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	£79
Contract monthly charge	£38.00
Contract period	24 months
Contract provider	Vodafone
Battery Life
Talk time, quoted	20hrs
Standby, quoted	2 days, 16hrs
Physical
Dimensions	70 x 9.8 x 146mm (WDH)
Weight	156g
Touchscreen	yes
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	2MB
Camera megapixel rating	4.1mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	5.0in
Resolution	1080 x 1920
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Android