OK, so let's have a look at the HTC One itself. It's obviously come in
a small little piece of sort of plastic there, just to keep
the thing from getting scratched and make sure it's all nice and shiny.
Ta dah! Here we go!
Now, the first instant thing that
I notice is these tapered edges are far superior to
the previous HTC One. That actually has a really nice feel in the hand.
I quite liked the first the HTC One from last year,
but the edges could feel a little bit kind of gratey
on these parts of your hand here. This has a very good
in the hand feel. Feels very similar to the
Galaxy S4 with its tapered edges. Very, very nice.
Now the most important task let's see if we can do this,
is the finger balance. Now if we get this device
near enough in its centre, it should
be able to find the pivot point. There we are. So what we can see here, this is actually a couple of
inches off the ground
but that is your kind of balance point on this device.
And it's actually very nicely balanced. If you notice I'm able to
lift it up-and-down and it isn't really moving around too much.
If I try that on the side of my finger should be able to get a similar kind of result
from it
There we go, a little bit more wobbly but
that is pretty well balanced I would say. The
original HTC One always felt like it had just a slight amount
of kind of top-heaviness on it so it would sometimes kind of tip more
that does feel nice. So just going
round the device as it were, just pop that down on the table,
one of the key things that we obviously have on the HTC
range of devices is the boom sound which is denoted by these two speakers.
On the original HTC One it gave incredible sound. We will be checking to see how
well that stacks-up on the new device. What we also have on the front is
the front-facing selfie camera that I think we can now well and truly dub
front facing cameras.
It is a 5-megapixel shooter which is a bit of an interesting one really
traditionally we normally would have maybe 2 or 3 megapixels or less.
Here we have a 5-megapixels normal style shooter so not ultrapixel
just 5-megapixels.
It's a standard kind of camera. The display is now a
5-inch display and it's pretty much edge to edge.
You can see a small amount of bordering here
but not a huge amount. On the bottom
this is where our standard kind of jacks are concerned.
We have our mini USB
micro USB whichever way you want to call it and a headphone jack.
On the top we have a power button and that's about our lot.
Taking a look at the front of the HTC One M8 2014
one of the key things that we can obviously notice is the speaker grille
very similar to the HTC One from last year.
It is boom sound which means it's got lots of front facing sound and
unlike most mobile phones and smartphones which have their speakers in the bottom
the back which ultimately means that the sound isn't really facing you,
in the HTC One from last year it was most definitely a stand-out
feature. Interestingly the front-facing camera is now a 5-megapixel shooter
which is interesting because effectively using ultrapixels for the back
cameras that really only topped out at the equivalent of around 4-megapixels
so in theory you'll get a slightly bigger quality of image
such a large image from the front facing camera than you will from the back, although
evidently the front-facing camera is not going to give you as good a quality of
image. Less light being able to come in. Now,
on the bottom we have our standard USB jack
and the headphone jack. On there, so charging and audio.
On the top is our power button and on the sides
we have to attract those which are used for the same
card. Excellent thing here, 32gig
is your storage but you can expand it through micro SD.
thankfully. Nothing worse than having a top-end
smartphone that's brilliant for media and not being able to actually get all of your media
you want to play onto it. Now,
on the back things haven't really changed a right lot from
the HTC One 2013. The major changes
really are dual cameras and dual LED flash which
I don't believe dual LED flash was on the previous HTC One. I'll
double check that actually and also we've got some noise cancelling microphone
point there I believe as well. Now the really interesting thing with the camera
array they've gone
for on the HTC One M8 is this dual camera setup.
Now we will be testing this in more detail and giving you some footage from that
as well. But ultimately the way this works is this is your primary camera here
and this takes your actual photograph. But this top camera is actually measuring the
depth of
the image as it's being taken. So what you can then do is
change the focus on the camera after you've taken the picture
so effectively you can take the picture, take your picture of a nice scene
maybe two people stood next to each other or pme person stood slightly into the background
and then afterwards you can kind of recompose the shot by making the foreground blurry
and the background sharp and vice versa and all of that is achieved by
this ability to have depth information generated from this second
camera. This could well be a watershed moment
in smartphone camera design. A very clever idea and something that's very similar
to a technology called Lytro.
which was kind of come up with a few years ago. Very interesting to see how this kind of
works out.
Now the HTC logo, it's slightly bumpy
it kind of is embossed into this metal and it
feels a little rough but mmm, it's not unpleasant.
Let's see how that kind of affects my in the hand. Mm,. You can feel a slight
roughness to it but it's not getting in my way. It's not catching on my hands or
anything
You can just feel it's there. In many respects that might actually help to
find the centrepoint of the device for grip, but we'll see.
Honestly it's just a little affectation really isn't it? It's just something to say Hey
mine's a HTC. But anyway, one thing I do really like though is these tapered edges
are gorgeous.
The more I hold it in my hand the more I kind of feel
wow, that is comfy. Even with that extra weight and the kind of size increase from the
you know the 4.7 inch screen I think it was in the previous one up to a
5-inch screen now and it's actually grown by about a centimetre
ttop and bottom, overall from the height
and a couple of millimetres on the width but it feels good.
It doesn't feel... this isn't kind of like holding a Note 2 or Note 3 for the
first time, where you're kind of like going Ooh!
my hand has expanded. This feels good
and the weight and distribution again feels really nice. Thanks for
watching. We hope you enjoyed this video. Do please remember to LIKE
and comment and if you'd like to, please subscribe.
You can also visit our website and download our Android app.
If you do subscribe you'll be getting a daily dose of the latest tech news
hardware reviews, Android games, consoles and basically an honest opinion
direct from the UK. Stay tuned, stay Androidizen.