Best Flagship Phone: HTC One M8

Oleh Unknown

Monday, December 15, 2014

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What's special about our winner? The HTC One M8 is a phone that seems to consider what it's like to use on a daily basis in almost every aspect. It's not just about one-upping the competition with a bit more spec here, some more tech there.

The design has a lot to do with it too. Like the HTC One (sometime referred to as the M7), it's made of aluminium, but HTC took the curved back a step further, making an incredibly smooth handset that feels great to handle. It's not small, but its ergonomics are more-or-less faultless.

You also get the BoomSound speakers we loved so much in HTC's other top-end phones, getting you much beefier sound than just about any other phone maker's mobiles. These two bits alone make the HTC One M8 a pleasure to use.

But there's more too. HTC plugged one big hole of the One M8 by adding microSD card support, while the camera adopted a dual-lens system that lets you create photos with artsy-looking blurry backgrounds. A gimmick? Perhaps, but the HTC does it better and quicker than any of the competition. And it's a sure way to get you a few more likes in Facebook with any portrait shots.

Also consider:

LG G3

It's not often that a phone combines a 'first' with standard-setting value, but that's just what the LG G3 did. It arrived cheaper than arch rival the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5, but was also the first big-name phone to use a QHD screen.

Next year's top-end phones will almost all offer this grade of resolution, but the humble LG G3 got you that all the way back in mid-2014. Did it get credit? Not as much as Apple would have for pulling the same trick. Meanwhile the LG G3 is still far, far sharper than the iPhone 6 Plus, despite costing half the price.

We don't love absolutely everything LG does, but we'll hand it to the company: it really pulled it out of the bag with the G3. Screen quality is far from the only benefit too. You get OIS in the camera, infrared, NFC, expandable memory. The list goes on.

Not everyone instantly falls in love with the way LG puts the volume and power buttons on the back of its phones, but even if you actively dislike the design, you'll get used to it in days. We still find ourselves regularly recommending the LG G3. We're often met with eyes rolling at the idea of buying an LG phone, but the G3 proves LG is back and deserves to be taken seriously.

iPhone 6

Apple's iPhones have gotten bigger. The iPhone 6 makes the iPhone 5S look like a toy, and it's the smaller of the two new iPhone models. However, it's also the better choice for many people.

You get an alarmingly thin body, whose increased size does not remotely feel like a practical compromise now we're all so used to much larger phones. Where the iPhone 6 Plus has come under fire for possibly being a bit bendy should you put too much pressure on certain parts of it, the iPhone 6 is a very solid design. And one that has all the power of its bigger sibling.

So why isn't it our phone of the year? Quite a lot of the key technical improvements were made in 2013. The iPhone 5S already had a fingerprint scanner, a 64-bit CPU and as ever there's nothing too specific to the iPhone 6 when it comes to software, which is shared with all recent iPhones.

Much as people always want Apple to drop the ball each year, though, it hasn't with the iPhone 6.

Tag : gadget