The HTC One M8 was another one of my few near perfect devices I’ve owned. I loved everything about it for the time I owned it.
The design and build was fantastic. The whole frame was a curved metal with the device being really thin and comfortable to hold yet sturdy. The only trade off to this brilliant design was the omission of a removable battery.
It’s camera setup was controversial at the time, as it only had a 4MP main camera with a 4MP depth sensor. HTC claimed their “Ultra Pixel” technology was the next big thing. I’m not sure about that, but the photos the camera produced were fine and being able to adjust the focus after the shot was taken was a nice feature.
When released this phone shipped with Android 4.4.2, and throughout it’s life got upgraded to Android 6. However the community around this phone was massive. It got official LineageOS support which took it all the way up to Android 10.
Once I’d finished my contract on this phone I moved into the period of combining my work phone and my personal phone (wouldn’t recommend this in any situation, however at the time I was practically forced into it) so didn’t pay for a phone for quite a while after this.
This phone continued it’s life for another few years after my ownership. With LineageOS continuing support for this device it was passed on to my Grandfather, who returned it back to me after his usage. By this point the battery was heavily degraded, and repairs weren’t easy on this device. I flashed the latest version of LineageOS and sold it on the used market. If you look now the HTC One M8 sells for very little money, but going back to around 2020 it still fetched around £100 used!
If you wanted a very cheap device, with lots of extra features and custom ROM support the HTC One M8 was a brilliant option at the time, and would still be a fun device for playing around with today.
Unfortunately HTC as we knew it is long gone, however I just had a look for their website and they currently have just 1 new smartphone for sale. I would love to see them make a comeback, our brand choices for smartphones in 2025 is getting more and more limited. Let’s take a moment for the fallen brands; Nokia, Blackberry, LG, Siemens, NEC, BenQ, Palm, Sagem and of course HTC.
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