The 'All New HTC One" (aka the M8)

The 'All New HTC One" (aka the M8)

Author
Discussion

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Sunday 13th April 2014
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
I've tried that. It does make a noticeable difference - lightening dark areas and vice versa - but again cannot compensate adequately when the camera is presented with high contrasts of light and dark in the same image.

[quote]Out of interest, is the viewfinder image consistent with the captured photo?
So far, yes. I've not caught it out yet. The M8 also has a very decent "burst mode", whereby holding the camera button will take twenty or so quick shots in succession, letting you choose and keep the best one. It means you don't have to capture the moment exactly, you get a few seconds of leeway.


Edited by SimianWonder on Sunday 13th April 17:39

devnull

3,754 posts

158 months

Sunday 13th April 2014
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Just spent a couple of hours pottering around with the phone and flashed the Google Play Edition ROM to my M8. Undecided if i'll keep it on at the moment, as I'm pretty sure i'll miss things like the extreme power saving mode, and the HTC Mini+ accessory doesn't have support.

Easy enough to flash the ROM if you're patient:

  • Unlock the bootloader (register as a dev on HTCs site)
  • Flash the recovery with philz CWM
  • Backup current ROM
  • Flash the play edition to the phone.

Polarbert

17,923 posts

232 months

Sunday 13th April 2014
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Can anyone tell me if there is a 'lock workspaces' option on the new One? I've just put an M8 rom onto my M7 and I've got a slight suspicion that there isn't, and my homescreens are now locked permanently. hehe

Funk

Original Poster:

26,294 posts

210 months

Sunday 13th April 2014
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Polar - to answer your question, not that I can see... Quirk of the ROM? Did it download and checksum properly?

devnull said:
Just spent a couple of hours pottering around with the phone and flashed the Google Play Edition ROM to my M8. Undecided if i'll keep it on at the moment, as I'm pretty sure i'll miss things like the extreme power saving mode, and the HTC Mini+ accessory doesn't have support.

Easy enough to flash the ROM if you're patient:

  • Unlock the bootloader (register as a dev on HTCs site)
  • Flash the recovery with philz CWM
  • Backup current ROM
  • Flash the play edition to the phone.
I've still not rooted mine yet. Isn't Play Edition just straight vanilla Android?

I have that on my N7 and often miss some of the Sense features.

joebongo

1,516 posts

176 months

Sunday 13th April 2014
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Has anyone had TomTom or Sygic running as GPS on a mixed urban/rural/m-way journey to report how well it tracks you?

Samsung seem universally awful but many years ago I had a HTC Desire which had excellent GPS performance and I wondered if HTC still had decent implementations of the function.


Polarbert

17,923 posts

232 months

Monday 14th April 2014
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Thanks Funk, it was just something I never used and must have enabled ages ago without realising. Apparently there is a menu on the homescreen and you can access it from that.


Mr.Jimbo

2,082 posts

184 months

Monday 14th April 2014
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Quite impressed with the battery life, I'm on 1 day and 7 hours with 30% left, and that's with quite a bit of usage.

The only slight gripe is the new 1.5A charger is a lot longer than the 1A one, which doesn't fit behind my bedside table! I was using the 1A but the battery life seems better after using the 1.5A? I can't say for certain yet as exact usage is probably different... I'll keep checking.

Haven't managed 3 days yet though!

Regards the camera, I've used the phone for some testing evidence at work and on a big screen at 1920x1080 the detail was very impressive. Could infer some fairly simply material failures from the pictures, which we were more than happy with.

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Monday 14th April 2014
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I've just put my M8 on charge for the first time; 100% to 2% and managing 2 days, 18 hours, 39 minutes and 49 seconds on that charge, which is pretty impressive, especially as that included a solid day of messing around with the new toy.

I also tried the extreme power saving mode today; at 7am I had 10% remaining, at 7pm, I had 2%, so the M8 used 8% in a 12 hour period. Granted, it was entirely unused in that time, but it's still a useful feature to have. One more observation I think would help my fellow M8 users; I noted that even with wifi turned off, the phone was still showing wifi as active on the power screen. Upon investigating, certain background apps can still access wifi even when it's turned off. This will certainly have an impact on battery life, however small, but thankfully this too can be turned off via Advanced Settings in the wifi menu.

Edited by SimianWonder on Monday 14th April 19:18

Funk

Original Poster:

26,294 posts

210 months

Monday 14th April 2014
quotequote all
SimianWonder said:
One more observation I think would help my fellow M8 users; I noted that even with wifi turned off, the phone was still showing wifi as active on the power screen. Upon investigating, certain background apps can still access wifi even when it's turned off. This will certainly have an impact on battery life, however small, but thankfully this too can be turned off via Advanced Settings in the wifi menu.
It's lower power than trying to a) locate by GPS and b) more accurate than triangulating with cell towers when you want something location-based. As Google have driven every road, they've made a note of what wifi signals they've passed (they got into trouble for actually sniffing unsecured ones...) and use these to help locate you.

kooky guy

582 posts

167 months

Tuesday 15th April 2014
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I used the Car app to navigate around central London last night and it was absolutely brilliant. Instant solid GPS lock, good responsive route planning and updates. Much better to use than my TomTom One and certainly streets ahead of my Desire HD!

Might have to find myself a windscreen mount!

Coolbanana

4,417 posts

201 months

Friday 18th April 2014
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Well, a couple of weeks in and I'm really happy with my M8.

I've seen the competition in S5 form and wasn't impressed; it felt and looked ordinary in the main albeit the screen was indeed nice. Sense 6 is so much better for everyday use too.

So my conversion to HTC is complete. I guess it should be though given they are very kindly taking me to the Champions League Final in Lisbon in May!

Edited by Coolbanana on Friday 18th April 20:39

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Friday 18th April 2014
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I think my M8 might be shipped with the wrong battery; it's currently on 26% remaining after more than four straight days!

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
quotequote all
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Regular power saver has been on for the entire duration, and I've used Extreme power saver for periods when I know I simply won't use the phone; ie during the working day and overnight. I've used the M8 for perhaps fifteen minutes each morning (checking news, blinkfeed and various websites), using the music player for ten-fifteen minutes each morning, and then an hour or so of more intensive internet use so each evening.

It's not heavy use - indeed the periods in the evening when it does get used more often, the battery visibly drops by ten or so percent in that time - but the Galaxy S3 that preceded it was lucky to make two days off charge, even with the same kind of use, so it's a massive improvement in those terms.

For what it's worth, it's now on 9% after four days, sixteen hours, six minutes and 46 seconds. It might just scrape five days, but I doubt you'd get much more unless you simply didn't ever take it off standby.

Funk

Original Poster:

26,294 posts

210 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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I recently switched from Dalvik runtime to ART but obviously still have a couple of apps that don't work properly with ART. It was chucking 'Android Upgrading' splash screens on startup (it shouldn't need to do this having done it once) but I have to say that I couldn't really see a difference in performance; I guess this is because the phone's so fast anyway.

I've gone back to Dalvik for now and the 'upgrading' message on reboot has gone.

tvrforever

3,182 posts

266 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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is the 32GB M8 available in the UK yet?

Funk

Original Poster:

26,294 posts

210 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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I haven't heard anything about it yet. I thought it might be worth waiting for but to be honest with the additional SD card it's not even an issue.

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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My thoughts exactly. With expandable memory, the 16GB phone should really be all you need.

joebongo

1,516 posts

176 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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I thought there was a "feature" related to security in jellybean or kit kat whereby apps couldn't access the sd card meaning some apps needed to be on the main memory, eg tomtom. If this is true then just maybe for some people the 32gb version would be useful.

Crafty_

13,294 posts

201 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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joebongo said:
I thought there was a "feature" related to security in jellybean or kit kat whereby apps couldn't access the sd card meaning some apps needed to be on the main memory, eg tomtom. If this is true then just maybe for some people the 32gb version would be useful.
It means the apps can't just write to any old place on the card. e.g. on my S3 I used antennapod for podcasts and wrote them to a directory called "podcasts" on the root of the SD card. On the S5 antennapod could not write to that folder "permission denied" However it was able to write to /Android/data/de.danoeh.antennapod on the SD card.
the idea is to prevent apps (potentially malicious ones) doing things that they shouldn't.

SimianWonder

1,144 posts

153 months

Saturday 19th April 2014
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The M8 finally needed recharging a few moments ago, but it did just scrape five days off-charge, Plants v Zombies 2 being the nail in the coffin on this occasion. Still, I'm genuinely amazed at the battery life, and the user experience of the M8 in general. It's a real show-stopper too; every time someone sees it, they want to hold it and the feedback is always the same - they love the way it feels and the way it goes.