Published on April 3rd, 2014 | by Guest

Perfection Quest – HTC One M8 vs Apple iPhone 5S

The HTC One M8 is speculated to be an able alternative to the Apple iPhone 5S. Let us compare and comprehend if these speculations are realistic.

Overview

The HTC One M8 is the latest smartphone offering from the Taiwanese mobile giant HTC for the year 2014. The new smartphone is much hyped about its quality and performance that match and even outshine that of the iPhone 5S, the latest smartphone from Apple. Though it is really early, here is an attempt to figure out if the HTC One M8 really has the spunk to overthrow the iPhone 5S off its impressive superior position.

Design & build quality

Both Apple and HTC are rather proud of their all metal classy design, and that is well justified too. The HTC felt the need of the classy metal chassis for the One M8 ignoring the weight issue which makes it stand at 160g, while the iPhone 5s is much lighter at 112g. While the all metal built gives a really rich feel and sturdiness, a check on the weight part is also desirable. The iPhone 5s is available in the classy color options of white, grey and gold, while the HTC One M8 is colored in silver, grey and rose gold, clearly an inspiration from the iPhone. While, HTC’s effort is really commendable, it is not up to the mark with Apple’s, especially when the HTC One M8’s weight is concerned.

Display

The HTC One M8 is a bigger handset compared to iPhone 5S, this naturally translates into a bigger screen. The HTC One M8 boasts of a 5 inch touchscreen as against the smaller 4 inch screen of iPhone 5S. The HTC One M8 also offers a higher screen resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, as against the iPhone 5S’ 1136×640 pixels. Though the HTC One M8’s screen should be sharper than the iPhone 5S’, in reality both are of same quality to the human eye, as the iPhone 5S has the advantage of a Retina display. While Apple is opposed to a larger screen as the iPhone offers great portability and ease of handling and viewing, most people do want a larger screen. Thus, here HTC One M8 is the winner.

Camera

Apple knows that the size of the pixels matters and being inspired by the iPhone, HTC did the same on the One M8. The megapixel count sounds good but actually does not mean much, thus the 16 or 20 megapixels of the companies such as Samsung and Sony really means nothing. The HTC One M8 comes with a 4.1 megapixel Ultrapixel lens, along with a 1/3” sensor with 2µm pixel size and ƒ/2.0 aperture. On the other hand, the iPhone 5S offers an 8 megapixel lens with 1/3” sensor and 1.5 µm pixel size and an aperture of ƒ/2.2.

Apart from bigger pixel size, the HTC One M8 also features the Duo Camera, which allows the users to shift the focus of the shots from one subject to another after they are taken. This creates a depth of field effect. Unfortunately, the camera does not do a great job in doing that.

The One M8 also gets the two tone flash feature boasted by the iPhone 5S. Apple employed this great feature to give a more natural illumination on the subject rather than the unnatural focal glare of the ordinary flash. Here both the phones do well. The HTC One M8 will be a great hit with the selfie fans as the phone comes with a 5 megapixel front camera against the iPhone 5S’ 1.2 megapixel secondary camera. Camera wise both the HTC One M8 and the iPhone 5S are sort of equal, while the HTC One M8 does have an edge because of the front facing camera.

Processor and specs

The HTC One M8 comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, quad-core 2.3GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM. It has a co-processor dual-band Wi-Fi. The iPhone 5S comes powered by a 64-bit A7 chip, with 1.3GHz and 1GB of RAM. It may seem less but is actually superb. HTC One M8’s co-processor is again inspired by Apple’s iPhone 5S. Both the phones efficiently monitor all sensors and data measuring capabilities without the help of the A7 chip and hence save battery life. The HTC One M8 looks great on paper and appears very impressive to the unsuspecting buyers, but in reality it is imply catching up with the iPhone 5S and is inspired by it.

Software & Storage

The iPhone 5S runs on Apple iOS with preinstalled iOS 7 and has access to all operating system features. On the other hand, HTC One M8 runs on the Android operating system in version 4.4.2 KitKat along with HTC Sense 6.0 user interface. This enables the users with some extra features that are customizable. Both the iOS and Android OS have their own pros and cons and are both very efficient. However, for money’s worth the iOS has an edge over the Android. When inbuilt storage is concerned, then the HTC One M8 comes with 16GB memory, while 32GB version is also available in some markets, plus it has the advantage of a microSD card slot to expand the memory to up to 128GB. The iPhone 5S comes in the variants of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB options in terms of inbuilt storage.

Here also the iPhone 5S is a winner, as considering the fact that most users buy the 16GB version of smartphones in order to get a lesser pocket pinch and because most actually do not use that much of memory space anyway. Here the interesting fact in that post the installation of the operating system no smartphone with 16GB storage offers actually 16GB, and this is exactly where the iPhone is a winner. While the iPhone 5S offers 12.6GB after OS installation, the HTC One offers only 10.44GB, while the Samsung Galaxy S5 offers as little as 8.56GB.

Final thought

On the whole, the HTC One M8 is a very capable smartphone no doubt, but when it comes to outshining the iPhone 5S, it is rather overrated, thanks to the media hype. The iPhone 5S remains the winner with all its practicality, comforts and real capabilities.

Tags: 5S, Apple, htc, iPhone, M8, one, showdown, Smartphone