HTC has high aspirations for the HTC One M8 and hopes it will replicate the success of its predecessor, which is listed by the Taiwanese firm as one of its best selling handsets ever. Featuring an evolved metal design and upgraded internal specifications, the HTC One M8 certainly appears to have the chops to do this
Price and release date
The HTC One M8 was launched at an event in London on Tuesday 25 March and is available for sale now in select stores across the UK in grey or silver, with a gold version to follow soon.
Phones 4u is offering the One M8 for £529.95 or free from £42 a month on 4G, while Carphone Warehouse is also selling it for £529.95 SIM-free and free on a £38 per month two-year contract.
EE will be selling the HTC One M8 in grey or silver from 26 March online, and through EE stores from 27 March, priced from £13.99 a month for 24 months plus £429 for the handset.
O2 is offering it at £13 a month with an upfront cost of £610, or £20 upfront if you're willing to shell out £48 a month.
Vodafone is offering the HTC One M8 free from £42 on Red 3G plans with unlimited calls, texts and loads of data.
The operators are also going all out to woo customers to the new HTC flagship on their network with thrilling offers and prizes.
Anyone signing up before 10 April on the EE Extra plan costing £37.99 per month with a £29.99 upfront cost will get 4GB monthly data allowance for their entire contract rather than the standard 2GB, and will get a free return flight to one of 12 destinations in Europe.
This is a bit more exciting than the offer from Vodafone of the first 3,000 customers getting an HTC Boombass. Although we'd be happy with the £100 House of Fraser vouchers from O2.
Three and Vodafone both prematurely revealed the HTC One M8's existence earlier this year. Three revealed it would be offering the HTC One M8 in a press release and Vodafone announced that the HTC One M8 will arrive on its network along with the Samsung Galaxy S5 earlier in March.
Specs and features
HTC has certainly struggled to keep chatter about its next flagship phone off of the internet and many of the pre-release rumours turned out to be correct.
The HTC One M8 features a design that's nearly identical to that of the original HTC One, sporting the same high-end aluminium casing. Sadly though, the rumour that the HTC One M8's back would be removable, allowing users to switch out the battery and expand its internal storage, much like the HTC One Max, turned out to be false.
The HTC One M8 houses a 5in HD 1080p display in this casing, which is powered by a quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB of RAM and Google's Android 4.4.2 Kitkat mobile operating system overlaid with HTC's new Sense 6.0 skin.
The skin features an upgraded version of HTC's Blinkfeed news aggregation service. The new Blinkfeed offers the same push update tiled interface as the original version debuted on the first HTC One, but adds support for a number of new news outlets and adds the ability to get "batch updates". Batch updates let you set Blinkfeed to only push updates about specific hashtags or topics.
As expected, the HTC One M8's standout feature is its camera setup. The HTC One M8 features an upgraded version of the 4.1MP "Ultrapixel" camera seen on the original One. The upgraded camera features a new beefed-up imaging co-processor and Duo Camera technology. The Duo Camera technology uses a second supporting lens to let the rear camera capture spatial information. This allows users to do things like retroactively adjust the point of focus on a captured image.
Past this the HTC One M8 comes with 16GB of storage, a microSD slot, support for 4G LTE and a 2,600mAh battery. It will also be available in a gold model, alongside silver and black versions.
A new case also launched alongside the HTC One M8 - a quirkly pinhole-cover affair which displays the time and weather. There was no word on prior speculation that HTC planned to release a Google Play Edition of the HTC One M8 or would announce a sequel to the HTC One Mini, as well as an Android smartwatch device. (
Copy Right)