The HTC One (M8)
is now official and most of the rumors we've seen so far came out
true. The smartphone sports a unibody made of 90% metal as opposed to
70% for its predecessor giving it an even sleeker look.
HTC One (M8)
The One (M8) screen has been bumped from a 4.7" unit to a 5", while
retaining the 1080p resolution. Side bezels have been slimmed down and
hardware keys have been replaced by on-screen ones so the difference in
size compared to the original One is minial.
The front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers that we so enjoyed on
the original One are back for another round with the M8. This year's HTC
flagship is said to be 25% louder, too.
As far as processing power goes, the HTC One (M8) offers a Snapdragon
801 chipset with a 2.3 GHz Krait 400 processor, Adreno 330 GPU and 2 GB
of RAM. The storage options are 16 GB and 32 GB but the M8 will allow
expansion by up to 128 GB through the microSD card slot.
The Android version is 4.4 KitKat with Sense 6 on top. One of the
coolest new features brought by the updated package is Motion Launch,
which lets you quickly open the camera or unlock the phone while the
screen is off. Picking up the One (M8) in landscape mode and pressing
the volume button will launch the camera. There's double tap or slide up
from the bottom to wake the phone. While locked you can pick up the
phone in portrait mode and swipe left on its screen to launch the widget
panel or right for BlinkFeed.
A newly introduced extreme Power Saving Mode promises to give you up
to 30 hours of running by using just 10% of the One (M8)'s 2,600 mAh
battery. Zoe has also been updated and can take 20 full-res stills
coupled with video in just three seconds. The Sense 6 launcher itself has been moved to the Play Store in an attempt to streamline the update process.
The camera department of the HTC One (M8) features a 4MP camera with
1/3" sensor, 2 micron-sized pixels and f/2.0 aperture plus a second
camera located above it meant to gather depth information. HTC calls
this Duo Camera. It mimics the stereoscopic abilities of the human eye -
two independent lenses able to calculate the relative distance of the
subjects in an image. HTC's dual camera setup enables cool effects such
as selective focus (shallow depth of field) and post-shot refocusing.
The front-facing camera is a wide-angle 5 MP unit making it a huge jump from last year's 2.1 MP.
Unfortunately, the optical image stabilization of the original One is
now gone, and the One (M8) will rely solely on digital stabilization to
do its magic. Similarly to Apple, HTC has improved the flash of the
smartphone by using a two toned one - one cold and one warm LED, which
can help the smartphone produce more accurate color tones in low-light
conditions.
Finally there's faster focus. HTC claims the One (M8) can focus in just 0.3s.
The HTC One comes with a variety of accessories like the Flip Case,
Double Dip case (each in three colors), Dot View case (showing you
alarms, events, calls, battery, weather and more in a colorful dotted
way) and more.
Coming in Gunmetal Gray, Glacial Silver and Amber Gold the HTC One
(M8) will be available in select markets starting today. It will roll
out across 230 carriers in Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, China,
Africa and the Middle East.
The new HTC One (M8)
comes with a Google Play Edition out of the gate – Holo UI fans can
enjoy stock Android 4.4.2 KitKat. Devs who need unrestricted access to
the phone will also enjoy a Developer edition.
The Developer edition will be unlocked and will set you back $649, the same price as the consumer device.
The Google Play Edition is more expensive - $699 – which is strange
since the bootloader should be unlocked and flashing a GPE ROM should be
easy. $50 is certainly a good motivation to learn how that's done.
Anyway, the Dev and GPE versions of the HTC One (M8) are identical to
the base model in terms of hardware, the only differences are in the
software.
The Google Play Edition will be available for pre-order from the US Google Play Store starting today. There's no info when and where the Developer edition will be available.
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