Roydon Cerejo

We had a chance to get spend a little one-on-one time with HTC’s new additions to the family today. Along with announcing the Indian pricing for the One M8, HTC also launched two new handsets for the budget and mainstream segment – the Desire 210 and the Desire 816. These two handsets will join the recently announced Desire 310 in the company's 2014 portfolio.

We’ll leave the Desire series for another article as we’ll be focusing on the One M8 today. Like most flagships these days, the M8 is an evolution of the HTC One and as far as we can see, it’s HTC’s finest piece of work yet. It’s hard to revolutionise product design when you’re expected to come up with a new phone every year. Refining an existing winning design makes a lot more sense than starting from scratch.

The M8 is thing of beauty. With chassis comprising of over 90 percent metal, it feels absolutely premium no matter the angle. The new One feels sleeker and more curvaceous than its previous sibling. The buttons have a good tactile feedback on sides and the placement is very ergonomic too. The power button is a bit of a stretch on the top though.

There’s quite a bit of extra space at the bottom which we feel could have been better utilised or simply done away with. As the M8 ditches capacitive buttons, HTC could have shaved down the bezel a bit more from the sides and bottom to make the display more striking. This is one area where LG has really excelled with the G2.

The only plastic bit is on the top for the IR blaster.

HTC has stuck with the 4MP Ultrapixel camera and from what we hear, they don’t plan on ditching that anytime soon. There’s an extra camera above it that records the depth of the scene your shooting. This lets you play around shift focus in post processing and add many new effects to your photographs. Unlike Google’s Lens Blur or Nokia’s Refocus app, the M8 can manipulate depth in photos with just a single shot. What’s more, HTC plans on opening the APIs of the depth sensor so third party developers can take advantage of that information in their apps as well.

The focusing and capturing speed is frighteningly fast and it’s tough to get a blurry picture with the M8. Be sure to check out the video for the camera features and a tour of the phone itself.

HTC has priced the One M8 at Rs 49,900 and it will go on sale from May 7. This is very competitive price when you consider the Samsung Galaxy S5 goes for Rs 51,500. The One M8 is a beautiful looking device which looks like a million bucks. HTC has focused their efforts on the look and feel of the phone greatly and the new Sense 6.0 feels fresh and modern. We’ll be bringing you an in-depth review of the same very soon as well, so stay tuned for that.