HTC One M8 Eye

HTC is constantly pushing out a range of devices in all price brackets and the latest is a slightly affordable alternative of the original HTC One M8 but with a different set of optics. Let’s check out the new HTC One M8 Eye.

The 13MP rear Eye

The highlight of the M8 Eye is its 13MP rear shooter, which integrates f/2.0 aperture lens, Sony’s BSI sensor and dual LED-flash. It is accompanied by a second sensor which particularly measures the depth information in the shots. The combination of these sensors is able to deliver some interesting shots that make this one of the best camera smartphone in the market. You can focus or unfocus a particular subject after taking the shot, can turn still images into 3D shots, record slow motion videos and can even take panorama 360 shots that offers an immersive view of your surroundings in a spherical view. However it’s a tedious procedure as you have to take continuous shots and then the camera hardware turns them into one large single spherical image.

The sharp, vivid and super responsive LCD 3 panel

The text, icons, pictures, videos and everything else looks sharp on the 5” super LCD 3 full HD screen that delivers 441ppi. The super bright display is very sensitive, has accurate colour reproduction, amazing viewing angles and good outdoors visibility.

 The same brushed metallic design

M8 Eye features the same brushed metallic design just like the original M8. The left edge houses the sim card tray and right has the volume rockers with micro SD card slot. The power button is placed on top right and does not offer a good feedback (same issue we encountered on One E8). The front has the same HTC BoomSound speakers that deliver loud and clear sound.

Sense 6 UI is one of the smoothest interfaces

M8 Eye runs Sense 6 UI over Android Kitkat 4.4.4, which is one of the smoothest user interfaces on Android devices as it is mostly stock android. Sense 6’s tweaks such as HTC Blinkfeed-a digital magazine, Motion gestures like double tap on screen to wake up the phone, Car mode, Kid Mode to make learning fun for children, HTC Zoe, etc. are very stable and handy.

The swift performer

HTC One M8 Eye comes packed with the same configuration as the original M8, which includes a quad-core 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, with an Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The combination works really smooth during multitasking, gaming or regular stuff such as apps loading or screen transitions.

The phone is no doubt one of the fastest android flagships in the market and is priced less than many competitors because of the non availability of a 2K display, which usually makes the price as high as Rs 50,000.

The 2600 mAh battery unit lasted for 5 hours 55 minute on full brightness at Wi-Fi during video playback test and gave us a 31 hours backup with a moderate usage that includes texting, surfing, camera, calling and some gaming. It was less than expected.

The M8 Eye takes nano Sim and we did not encounter and issues with the call quality in the busy networks of Delhi NCR.