It may be hard to stand out in the current crop of flagship smartphones, but the HTC One managed to do so with a combination of eye-catching industrial design, a superb screen, and surprisingly good speakers. Now the second-generation HTC One looks to improve upon its predecessor in all the right places, offering innovative camera features, a state-of-the-art CPU, expandable storage, and a bigger screen to go along with a higher-capacity battery.
On the outside, the HTC One M8 features the same recognizable design, but with a handful of refinements. Its unibody metal construction still makes it look like the smartphone version of the MacBook Pro, albeit with more-rounded edges and a finish that's more brushed than matte. It'll come in a few color variations: silver, gold, and gunmetal gray.
"Metal can interfere with the super-sensitive antenna," said HTC CEO Peter Chou during Tuesday's launch event for the phone in New York City. "This is why our competitors use so much plastic. We have developed this breakthrough process that integrates a sensitive antenna with metal construction. It allows us to push the use of metal further than anyone in the industry."
Even when you factor in the HTC One Max and Mini spinoff phones, the new HTC One M8 features an entirely new screen size for the lineup. At 5 inches diagonally, the screen is the same 1920 x 1080 resolution as its predecessor, which means it will have a slightly lower pixel density than the original.
Audio quality is bound to remain a sweet spot, as the One M8 has the same front-firing "BoomSound" stereo speaker setup as its predecessor — although all mention of Beats Audio is gone. According to HTC, the new speakers offer improvements over the original in terms of dynamic range and lack of distortion, and they are 25 percent louder than the speakers in the original One.
Under the hood, the phone should be quite a bit peppier. It runs on a quad-core 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 system on a chip with 2GB RAM, which matches the processing guts of the Samsung Galaxy S5. It's an Android 4.4 KitKat phone, but it doesn't run stock Android. The M8’s HTC Sense 6.0 overlay does add a few interesting features, though. You can double-tap the screen to wake up the phone like the LG G2, and swiping the phone while it's in standby mode will navigate to its app menu and dialer.
The Sense UI and the phone’s unique dual-camera setup also helps make it the first smartphone that's able to pull off Lytro-like refocusing tricks after you shoot. Like the original HTC One, the new One M8's main camera is a four-megapixel "Ultrapixel" sensor built for low-light shooting instead of resolution. It's the same size as the sensor found in the iPhone 5s, but with much bigger pixels to help gather available light and an F2.0 lens to help with that task.
But the new smartphone also has a secondary camera above the main lens that captures an image at a separate focal length. After shooting, you can select a focus point in your image using the phone's UFocus feature. HTC also says it is opening up its camera API to developers, so that other apps can tap into its unique depth-sensing ways.
"For the first time on a smartphone, this dual camera captures true depth information in your photos," said Chou during the launch-event keynote. "We went the extra mile to do this the right way at the hardware level. It is an integrated part of our camera, so you don’t have to fumble with a clumsy mode or app."
HTC also says the new camera has a faster autofocus system and manual exposure settings, as well as a way to save presets as custom modes.
More juice, too. The battery has been upgraded to a 2600 mAh capacity unit, which is an upgrade over the original’s 2300-mAh battery. According to HTC, the new battery and power-saving features translate to a 40-percent increase in battery life over the original One. The HTC One M8 will be available in 16GB and 32GB versions, but unlike its predecessor, it also has a MicroSD slot for expanding its storage capacity.
The HTC One M8 will be available for all four major U.S. carriers by April 10. However, starting today at 1pm ET/10am PT, you can order the phones online at ATT, Verizon, and Sprint. And starting at 1pm ET/10am PT today, the phones will be available in Verizon stores. Depending on the carrier, the phones will cost $200 to $250 with a two-year contract or $650 unlocked.
In case you're interested in a stock Android version of the phone, there's a Google Play edition planned for the future. In fact, there's already a landing page on the Google Play store for the unlocked version of the Google Play edition, which will cost $700.
