Review: HTC One (for Windows)

After a successful debut on Android, HTC re-architected its second-generation HTC One for the Windows Phone platform. The result: Gorgeous, flagship-level hardware repainted with a fresh interface.

Windows Phone has been struggling to gain market share in the U.S., especially among high-end handset buyers. Now, those itching to give the mobile OS a try have another high-end hardware option: the HTC One. While the overall hardware and software experience is great, the phone does have a few annoying quirks.

The Windows Phone-equipped version of the HTC One, like its Android counterpart, is an incredibly handsome smartphone. The front is dominated by a 5-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 LCD display. The rear is a brushed metal plate punctuated by stripes of black banding near the top and bottom of the device that wrap around its circumference to form the borders of the front display. The phone's slender edges fit securely in one hand without feeling sharp, while a subtle chamfer along the top edge gleams smartly. The size, while too big for me to operate one-handed, is such that I could still fit it in my rear jeans pocket and jacket pockets. It’s essentially the same phone physically as the original M8, with dual rear-facing cameras (4 megapixels and 5 megapixels), a 5-megapixel front shooter, and a 2.3 Ghz quad-core processor inside.

Microsoft has made huge strides since it first debuted its Windows Phone platform, but there's clearly still some things missing.

The customizable, Live Tile-filled homescreen is one of my favorite aspects of the platform. Here, you can, at glance, get information like what’s next on your calendar, how many new emails you have, the weather, and your travel time from wherever you are to your home (thanks to Cortana). It’s super easy to pin app tiles to the homescreen, adjust their size, and arrange them Tetris-style in the order of your choosing. If you’ve done this well, the idea of navigating a grid of app icons becomes downright barbaric.

I also love Windows Phone 8.1’s autocorrect and auto predictions. More often than not, I can skip typing more than half of my message because it correctly anticipates what words I’m likely to type next. This does hinge on typing the correct first letter of the word most of the time, though.

And then there’s Cortana, a smartphone assistant that lies somewhere in between Google Now and Siri. On the surface, she’s more useful than Apple’s assistant, surfacing relevant information or breaking news headlines directly on Live Tile or the lockscreen. For example, while in San Jose one evening, Cortana conveniently reminded me of an upcoming event in San Francisco on the lockscreen with map directions and estimated travel time so that I wouldn’t be late. Her ability to understand natural language voice queries is quite good unless there’s significant background noise, like when you’re walking along a busy street.

Performance on the handset is on-par with other leading Android and Windows Phone handsets—speedy and smooth—although some apps (namely Instagram, which is still technically a beta on Windows Phone) took a little longer to load than I would like.

My biggest complaint about the HTC One (M8) for Windows is the camera experience. The phone comes with two camera apps: Windows Phone’s default, and HTC Camera. Both actually housed fewer photo modes than I’ve come to expect from a camera app. HTC’s app has a panorama mode and a selfie mode, which includes a countdown timer for your close up. Windows’ built-in camera has a burst mode for capturing shots in quick succession. In editing after the fact, you can add filters, crop or resize a photo, or for some shots, that second rear-facing camera (which HTC calls its Duo Camera) comes into play. Duo editing options can give an image a pseudo 3D effect, can let you adjust where the focus of a photo is (kind of like a Lytro camera), and can add a handful of visual effects like “blur” or “cartoon” to the unfocused background of a shot. It does not seem to have all the unique gimmicks found on the Android version.

The rear-facing camera’s shutter speed is pleasantly quick, but I found its image stabilization to be lacking. I’m one of those people that can’t seem to snap a photo without dipping or shaking the phone slightly, which resulted in some slightly blurry, out-of-focus shots where other cameras, like that in the iPhone 5s, are able to compensate for my unsteady hands. This camera does take great 1080p video footage. However, the front-facing camera’s image and video quality, despite being 5-megapixels, is pretty low by today’s standards.

The worst part of the camera experience is that there is no way to access the camera in a pinch. There is no dedicated shutter button, or volume button workaround, like in the Android version of this handset, and no access to the camera on the lockscreen. You have to swipe to eliminate the lockscreen, then tap a Live Tile to get to the app. That’s precious seconds lost when you’re trying to quickly and discreetly capture a cool moment at a concert, for example.

But despite my camera hangups, the Windows Phone version of the HTC One is undoubtedly a good phone. It’s available on either Verizon or AT&T’s 4G LTE networks, and unless you’re doing seriously intense, non-stop activity on the phone, you can easily get a day or more’s battery life out of the handset. If you mostly use your handset for emails, internetting, social media, and watching video, you might enjoy this handset as much or even more than its Android counterpart. But if you’re a heavy camera user, or rely on specific apps not yet on Windows Phone (Google Authenticator and Training Peaks were two I missed), this is not the handset for you.