Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

A key goal with Microsoft's massive Windows Phone 8.1 update was to make Windows Phone easier for OEMs to put onto hardware by ditching the requirements for special hardware buttons.

Specs at a glance: HTC One (M8) for Windows Screen 1920×1080 5" (440 PPI) IPS LCD Gorilla Glass 3 touchscreen OS Windows Phone 8.1 Update CPU 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 RAM 2GB GPU Adreno 330 Storage 32GB Networking 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, GPS, GLONASS Cellular GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900MHz), HSPA+ (850/900/1900/2100MHz), CDMA (800/1900MHz), LTE (Bands 3,4,7,13) Ports Micro-USB, headphones, microSD Camera Rear: 4MP "UltraPixel", 1/3" sensor, f/2.0 aperture, 28 mm lens, 1080p video, depth sensorFront: 5MP, wide angle, 1080p video Sensors Accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, NFC Size 146.4 mm × 70.6 mm × 9.4 mm Weight 160 g Battery 2600 mAh

By moving to on-screen buttons, the same basic hardware can be used for both Android and Windows Phone. Combine that with the new zero-dollar licensing for Windows Phone, and creating Windows Phone hardware should be a no-brainer for phone OEMs: design one piece of hardware and sell it with two different operating systems.

The first phone we saw to take advantage of this wasn't, in fact, an Android handset. It was Nokia's low-end Lumia 630. While this was Android-spec hardware, with on-screen buttons and without the characteristic Windows Phone camera button, it was a phone that was designed from the outset for Windows Phone.

The second phone to take advantage of the new hardware rules is, however, an Android handset. HTC's flagship One M8 has been on the market running Android 4.4 since March 25th of this year. And now it's on the market with Windows Phone 8.1. Aside from a screen-printed Windows Phone logo on the back, the hardware appears to be completely identical to the Android version.

Weirdly, HTC names it the "HTC One (M8) for Windows." Not "Windows Phone." Just plain "Windows." And yes, the parentheses around "M8" are part of the official name. HTC made a real mistake when it called last year's flagship the HTC One, because where do you go from One? The HTC Two? Is that an upgrade? "M8" distinguishes the handset from 2013's "M7," but the name hardly seems optimal. Microsoft may have the same problem with the Xbox One's successor, though that's still many years away.

Putting Windows Phone on this hardware is no bad thing. The HTC One M8 is a fine piece of kit, with a sleek metal body, a gorgeous 5-inch 1920×1080 LCD display, a fast Snapdragon 801 2.3GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, and both 32GB of internal storage and support for up to 128GB of microSD.

The phone looks pretty good, too, though it is remarkably tall. There's a bezel top and bottom to support the stereo speakers, which I suppose is fine, but there's also a superfluous panel with HTC's logo on it. This strip looks as if it's where physical buttons are supposed to go. But they don't, of course, because the buttons are on-screen. Apparently HTC needed to make the phone this tall to fit everything inside, but it seems a little strange.

The phone is also a slippery little beast. While it looks like it's brushed metal, it feels high gloss. It's not an issue with a cover on, but I would be more concerned than normal that I'd drop a naked M8. The power button is also awkwardly out of reach at the top of the phone, though double tapping the screen is supported to wake the phone from sleep.

I also found the screen wasn't great in the bright Texas sunshine, even at full brightness. In truth, no phone truly excels in this harsh and unforgiving environment, but many of Nokia's Lumia phones have a kind of overdrive mode for the screen that cranks up the brightness at the expense of image fidelity. While this causes a deterioration in the accuracy of the screen, it makes the screen substantially easier to see in bright daylight.

A taste of Android’s hardware diversity for Windows users

Android has been considered by many to be the Windows of the smartphone world; the ubiquitous software platform that's available on an enormously wide range of hardware. This is in contrast to Windows Phone, which has had much tighter hardware requirements. With the One M8, some of that hardware diversity comes to Windows Phone. In addition to all the familiar hardware gizmos—gyroscope, digital compass, ambient light sensor, and so on—the One M8 has a couple of bonus features. The first is an infrared transmitter. With a special app, HTC Sense TV, the One M8 can be used to control TVs, cable boxes, and receivers.

I couldn't completely test this myself, as I don't own a television. OK, that's not completely true; I do own a television, but I don't have an antenna, and it isn't hooked up to cable. The app actually looks pretty neat, though. You tell it where you live and what kind of TV you have (cable, OTA, whatever), and it shows you an appropriate program guide. And thanks to the IR transmitter, the app can change the channel to the one you want.





While this is a gimmick feature—I can't imagine too many people will buy the One M8 just to get the TV app—it's one that I could see being pretty useful to TV watchers. The interface is arguably better than most built-in TV program guides, and I'm much less likely to misplace my phone than I am the TV remote.

The other bonus hardware on the One M8, and the kind of thing that we can expect to see on other handsets too, is HTC's Dot View smart covers. These protective covers are covered with a dot grid, through which the screen can still shine through, enabling a kind of 8-bit clock, call indicator, weather display, and so on.

This kind of accessory wasn't previously possible in Windows Phone. However, the latest update, currently available as a developer preview, adds support for precisely this kind of accessory.

In addition to showing (part of) the screen, the Dot View cover also enables limited interaction. Incoming calls can be answered or rejected by tapping appropriately on the cover, and swiping down on an idle phone can be set to enable Cortana voice input, so Microsoft's virtual assistant can be used without having to open the cover.

However, the Dot View support isn't as rich as its Android equivalent. On Android, there's greater control of the notifications that can be shown in Dot View, as well as some theming support to control the colors it uses. None of this appears to be present on the Windows Phone version.

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Normally I strongly prefer naked phones. I've not broken a phone through dropping it in 15 years of carrying mobile phones, and I generally don't want the extra bulk or (typically) poor aesthetics that come of using a cover. But the Dot View cover is actually rather nice. The 8-bit style graphics are fun, the integration with the phone's software is sensible, and the special Xbox green Xbox-branded cover adds a touch of personality to the phone. I could definitely see myself using the Dot View cover, and think it's an appealing addition to the phone.

HTC’s camera: Still weird

HTC has tried to differentiate itself from the rest of the Android competition with its weird "UltraPixel" camera, which has a relatively low resolution—4MP—but, according to HTC, larger pixels. The main One M8 camera is, in fact, two cameras, giving the phone some amount of depth perception. With this system, you can adjust image focus and use a kind of 3D effect after taking the picture. This is all done in a pair of HTC apps: HTC Camera and HTC Photo Edit.

HTC Camera appears to be very similar to its Android version. Swiping switches between front and rear cameras, and a collapsible menu on the left provides quick access to ISO, white balance, and similar settings. Missing from the Windows Phone app are two particular features found on Android, the first of which is a simultaneous shooting option that captures from both front and rear cameras simultaneously.







The other is HTC's "Zoe" feature, which enables short videos to be taken with simultaneous still shots. HTC made a lot of noise about Zoe with the first 2013 HTC One. The company seemed less interested in it with the 2014 model, and on Windows Phone it's missing completely. I'm not sure I feel like I'm losing out.

The camera itself is adequate. By default, the saturation of the pictures is, relative both to the Nokia phones I used and to real life, cranked way up. The colors are simply much more vibrant on the One M8.











In the case of my indoor shots, that vibrant color actually looks pretty good. But it isn't at all accurate; my Nature's Prophet (left) and Shagbark (right) just don't look this spectacular in my office as the picture makes out. The picture from the 930 is much more dreary, but it's much more representative of my office's lighting.











The high saturation is much more of a liability in the outdoor shots; the sky and the trees are all simply wrong. They're far too bright, to the point of not even looking realistic. Some of this may be fixable by fiddling with the options or tweaking it in software, but for the quick, impromptu pictures that people take with smartphones, I don't think that's a realistic thing to demand.

This puts the One M8 in a bit of an awkward position. Windows Phone hasn't had a tremendous diversity in system hardware, but thanks to Nokia, it has had a strong showing when it comes to camera hardware. HTC's gimmicks don't feel tremendously convincing. In a generally high-end device, the camera feels like a definite weakness. It's not a horrible camera. It's just not a great one.

I don't buy into HTC's "bigger pixels are better than more pixels" line of argument. In bright light, where the signal-to-noise ratio is high anyway, having more pixels gives you more usable resolution, providing more flexibility for cropping or editing pictures. In low light, using lots of pixels and resampling the image (to combine the signal from multiple pixels into one) can substantially reproduce the effect of having fewer, larger pixels anyway. As such, having more pixels is the more flexible option, with the Lumia 1020 being the most extreme demonstration of this idea.

Even the refocusing feature has been largely reproduced in software-only systems. I don't doubt that, with two separate cameras, the One M8 can do this effect more accurately, but I'm not sure it makes a great difference in practice.

The lack of a hardware camera button, as seen previously on the Lumia 630, is also annoying. On Android, HTC has provided a shortcut to unlock the phone directly into the camera app. There doesn't appear to be any similar facility on the Windows Phone version. The long-term solution to this problem must come from Microsoft, with some kind of camera-from-lock feature similar to that found on Windows 8.1 and iOS. More examples of the camera can be found in our review of the Android handset.

As things stand, I'd go so far as to say that the lack of the hardware camera button is the biggest drawback to using Windows Phone on Android-spec hardware.