HTC One M8: On the minus side
With all that in mind, what’s less than optimal?
As nice as the HTC One M8’s 4 megapixel camera is, it’s not without its issues. A lot of the added effects that you can dump onto photos are just awful, from face smoothing (which virtually never works on any phone) to virtual falling leaves.
Then there’s the camera features with variable quality. The secondary camera allows the HTC One M8 to perform Lytro-style refocusing on images after they’ve been taken, which has the potential to be very neat, especially if you’re shooting in a hurry.
It’s just that there’s a number of factors that block this feature, including using Flash, being shuffled into Macro, or using burst mode. It’s understandable, but if you’re shooting essentially in automatic mode, and I’d strongly suggest that most people do shoot that way, you’ll undoubtedly hit a situation where you’ll want to refocus, only to find that you can’t.
Likewise, you can use the Duo camera to create a faux-3D effect that tilts around as you move the HTC One M8 screen, which sounds neat in theory. In actual use, though, it has a serious tendency to warp objects photographed this way, which is entirely understandable given the limitations of simply pointing two cameras at one object from the same angle, but is nonetheless a little disappointing.
HTC’s Sense UI has evolved over the years, becoming lighter in touch with each iteration, but the one bit of software that’s made the jump over to the HTC One M8 is BlinkFeed. BlinkFeed offers a curated news feed across one of the HTC One M8’s display screens. It’s not a terrible app, but I’m still left wishing it was optional rather than permanently there, unless you switch to a different Android launcher.
A lot of Android smartphones are shipping with inbuilt dust and water resistance, including the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Sony Xperia Z2, but HTC haven’t gone down that particular route. Get the HTC One M8 wet, by for example playing on the Boomsound speakers when I’ve got a bucket of water handy, and it’ll quickly be a very pretty brick.
The underlying 2.3GHz Quad-Core Snapdragon 801 processor flies along in real world usage, so what happens when you throw benchmarks at it? What happens is that, like so many other Android OEMs, HTC outright cheats by sending the HTC One M8 into overdrive to secure the best possible scores, so much so that it lauds it as a feature. I’ve been over this before, and while I do think that in many ways benchmark scores for Android devices are something of a rapid urination contest, it’s still irritating that vendors think that they should or would act this way. Smarten up, HTC!
By default the HTC One M8 uses what it calls “Motion Launch” gestures to unlock the screen. These allow quick access to widgets, BlinkFeed and phone dialling, and they’re really quite hyper-sensitive. The only issue here is that if you do opt for the Dot View case, you’ve got to leave Motion Launch enabled, or it won’t work for double taps to display quick system info when you want it.
While on the subject of the Dot View case, while it’s a minor criticism, the back of the case is terribly ordinary looking. The HTC One M8 is a great looking phone, and this just makes it look like any other plastic budget device. I’d say that the team behind the design of the HTC One M8’s body needs to have a long hard talk to whoever designed the Dot View case.
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