HTC One M8 initial impressions
I’ve had the HTC One M8 in hand for a few days now. I have no idea how other blogs have managed to have such absurd love or hatred of the device in this amount of time, but perhaps I’ll know by tomorrow when I’ve reached the ownership period in which the larger blogs declare it an uncompromised success or failure.
Here’s what I’ve gotten from using it a few days.
Benchmarks
Antutu benchmark scores topped out at 37,058 using the ART runtime, 36,052 using the Dalvik cache. I had variances of about 10% for no apparent reason between tests. ART gives about a 3% improvement, but takes about 15 minutes to switch to.
Battery change was unnoticeable, as I haven’t had the phone long enough to establish a reasonable baseline.
Quadrant scores a Dalvik M8 around 25,000 – I didn’t test on ART.
I’m not sitting next to my EVO 4G LTE at the moment, but will attempt to post comparison scores later.
Camera
How to put this so it doesn’t offend people is the question. If you know what you’re doing, the camera is amazing.
If you don’t understand that having the flash turned on and taking a picture from three feet away is going to whitewash your subject, you’re going to be in for some disappointment.
Unfortunately the camera is very subjective. I didn’t see a huge improvement when I pitted the HTC EVO 4G LTE against the HTC One M7, but I think I will when I put the M8 into the mix this weekend. The pictures are significantly better.
Here’s the thing – more megapixels means you can crop, do some software zoom, and print a zoomed photo well. The lower resolution but higher ability to get the correct color means the One M8 looks better in general though, so if you take the photo right the first time and don’t rely on post-photo processing you’re golden.
I’ll be posting comparison photos next week hopefully. All I can get today in badly lit dreary overcast photos, which are good but not the entirety of what I want.
Pictures are selfie/front facing camera, and main camera in overcast both on default image size settings. You can click to see what they look like full size/zoomed. No editing or change has been applied to the settings on the camera. This is what it takes out of the box.
Write speed
Judging by how long it takes to make a nandroid backup, I do not believe that the SD write speed has improved much, if any. Nandroids still take their own damned time, copying large chunks of data to and from the device seem about the same speed.
The lack of amazingly superior NAND write speed isn’t a killer, but it’s a disappointment.
Boomsound
I’m not hearing what the difference is between the M7 and the M8 at the moment. The built-in speakers do sound absurdly better than any phone I’ve previous owned.
Battery life
I don’t have a great basis for this yet, but on two moderately heavy use days I ran for 14 hours before hitting a battery warning. These moderately heavy use days for me involve plenty of benchmarks, nandroids, swapping out runtimes and rebuilding the cache, I think an average user could expect 20 hours.
I’m not an average user.
I’ll know more about the battery and whether it ends up biting me in the behind later.
Rooting
Little more complicated at the moment, but that’s just because it’s the first couple of weeks… give it a bit and it will be normal.
There’s no S-OFF at the moment, but things seem to all be doable with just HTCDev unlocking at the moment.
Build
I’m not a fan of the headphone jack being on the bottom of the phone, I keep thinking the SD slot is the volume control, but other than that I’m impressed by the thing.
Size
There have been plenty of pieces I’ve read on this saying it felt unwieldy or too big for a pocket. I guess it depends on your pockets, but the phone seems to fit in my pockets easier than my EVO 4G LTE with case did.
Miscellaneous
- Sticker with MEID on back looks like crap three days in, can’t peel it off, going to have to wait it out
- Sense Six so far not wowing me, but still early
- Blinkfeed RSS improvement is nice, however doesn’t seem to be pulling Pocketables?
- Phone calls sound great except in my neighborhood
- Get the sense that HTC actually cared about this release, unlike the 4G LTE, or the 3D, or the Shift, or… keep going with this.
Wrap-up
So far it seems like a worthwhile upgrade to the EVO 4G LTE. I didn’t really care for the original One all that much, but if I can get a case with a kickstand on it (looking at you to make this happen, Seidio), I’ll be a happy camper.
