HTC One M8 review: Not worth it in 2018

HTC One M8 review: Storage

HTC has also added a microSD card slot to the HTC One M8, letting you add up to 128GB of extra capacity to the 16GB or 32GB of internal storage (depending on the model).

Unfortunately, Google’s revised permissions in Android 4.4 make it a bit harder to edit or move the files saved to external storage, but anyone that uses their smartphone as an MP3 jukebox or portable video library will still appreciate its inclusion.

HTC One M8 review: Performance

The M8 is powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 801 processor, which seems to have made its way into almost every flagship smartphone in 2014 so far. The quad-core chip runs at 2.3GHz and is paired with 2GB of RAM, which translates to incredibly fast performance. Even with Sense 6 running on top of Android 4.4 KitKat, the phone felt incredibly responsive, loading apps quickly and drawing image-heavy websites like BBC News and The Guardian with no noticeable lag or slowdown.

This translates to impressive benchmark scores too; the M8 managed 662ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, making it the fastest Android-powered smartphone we’ve fully tested to date when it comes to web browsing. The Adreno 330 GPU is also more than adequate for playing any game in the Google Play Store today; it played demanding 3D titles like Real Racing 3 smoothly and scored 20,465 in the 3DMark Ice Storm test.

HTC One M8 review: Battery

We expected this power to come at the expense of battery life. The HTC One M8 has a 2,600mAh battery, which is slightly larger than the original One, but the larger screen and faster chipset could have easily meant less time between recharges.

Thankfully, the M8 proved to be a frugal performer, lasting 13 hours 28 minutes in our video rundown test. That’s a significant improvement over the original One, which lasted a mediocre 8 hours 32 minutes, but still falls behind Sony’s Xperia Z2, which lasted more than 16 hours.

HTC has added two battery saving modes, which we’ll be testing throughout the week to see how battery life improves when the CPU is kept in check.