HTC one M8 - horrible design

[BBSeattle]

Ford, Chevy, Dodge....pick your poison.
Vive la diff?rence.........

 

[isdaako]

Why do so many people fail to realize the myriad ways that sound can be enjoyed from this besides "music"? There are many, many ways in which we use and enjoy sound that do not involve listening to music or using headphones.

Sure, for pure musical enjoyment, good headphones are the way to go. Otherwise, open your mind and recognize all the other settings in which these great speakers can really shine.

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Kuato

View attachment 119754

 

[AshtonVibe]

Opinion posts, my favorite!

You know I've heard others not rockin with the length of the phone. I find one handed use to be great. Great to fit into one hand to grab onto the slipperyne....I mean, the sleek design. Lol. Also, landscape mode is still nice. HTC did it right. Length to enhance speakers, and larger screen area. Capacative keys, so that they dissaper when media viewing is needed. Still functional with one hand. Their Max variant will take care of your needs later this year. Good luck.

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[dwb3838]

I remember when I carried my tiny flip phone in my pocket and wanted a phone as small as I could find I thought the I phone was a beast and how anyone would want to carry that big brick around now look at them today the I phone is as of now the runt and everyone is going bigger and I carry my m8 in my pocket with no problem it's cool how times have changed . I was gonna purchase a Palm pre when it came out cause of its small size but instead I bought the HTC evo 4g and other than battery it was the best phone I had ever had and that was the end of small puny phones for me .

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[rahxephon]

The bezels and overall dimension ratio surely don't help if that's going to be your biggest issue, but give it a chance... Once you've tried Sense 6.0 and blasted those speakers on high it's really hard to put the phone down.

 

[Topgonzo]

Lol opinion posts.. It's a phone and phones are moving in the direction of bigger. I never thought I would want a phone 5" or more but once you have gotten used to a phone then there's no going back. The size when placed by another phone like the s5 or m7 is slightly bigger but not much.

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[Quis89]

I guess I don't quite get the point of this post considering this has been discussed millions of times.

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[Quis89]

I'm sure that they could have put in all those specs and still have small bezels. LG have seemingly managed to do it with the G3. Also, I don't really see the point in having the speakers were they are. It may give a better sound but who uses their phone in this way? If I want to listen to music on my phone, I put earphones in as I would imagine most people do.

I use my phone in this way. Obviously you don't. So find a phone that better suits you. Simple.

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[TJGEsq]

I would love for this phone to be shorter. If they had found a way to remove the bottom bezel, that would be fantastic.

Having said that, I don't really ever think about the phone as being long. I'm used to it, and it's the best phone I've ever had. Going naked (i.e., no case) certainly helps.

 

[Prinny Mask]

If they found a way to remove the bottom bezel, that would be great. They'd be the very first to have a phone with no bottom bezel, because it's like seriously, people who complain about it should point me to a phone that doesn't have a big slab on the bottom. The only reason why people think it's such a big deal is because they mistakenly believe that they can fit all these internals into just the speaker area. They see all that room and then they see this big black bar, and they think, "why do they even need that? They already have all this space." That's not how this type of engineering works.

Watch the iFixit teardown. You will see that the battery takes up nearly the entire space from the bottom of the rear camera to the top half of the black bar. When you stick headphones in, the plug goes all the way up into the bottom half, and I took a picture at the bottom to show it. The battery alone is almost as big as the whole screen. The only way they could possibly fit all the internals in was by putting most of them on top of everything else. The circuit boards take up nearly 85% of the total area of the phone, and another 10% is from the connectors hooking them up to everything. You watch the video, and it's like where else could they have possibly moved the electronics in the bezels?

I mean yeah, I'd like it if they got rid of the bar and made the phone smaller or used the space for a larger screen, but I'm going to be realistic about the limitations of the technology instead of saying it's automatically a fail. You know what I want more than HTC to get rid of the black bar? A side-mounted power button. Or, Motion Launch to have a tap to lock gesture. They could have the bar forever and make the phone as tall as they want, as long as I don't have to reach to the top of it to hit a power button, it's fine.



And here's a link to the iFixit teardown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP0glVbQfWQ

 

[goobs10]

If you look at comparison pictures, the bottom bezel on the G2 is actually slightly bigger than the black bar on the M8, and the leaks of the G3 so far don't make it out to be any smaller. If you took out all the space the speakers occupy, the M8 would actually be the smallest flagship since the Moto X, and then it would be down to a 4.7" vs 5" screen difference. Almost half of the speaker's area is literally unusable, because that's where they actually are. The rest of the top bar is occupied with the notification light, sensors, and camera. The bottom has the microphone, micro USB port, and headphone jack. They need that black bar, because there really is no room for anything else. It's not that LG can shrink their bezel down to nothing, it's that they specifically design their screens to need as little bezel and be as thin as possible in the first place. As far as I know, HTC's been using tweaked versions of the same display technology from the DNA. That's not a bad thing since it's pretty much always been one of the best screens, and gets better with each iteration, but they're still dealing with the technical constraints of how much room the display still needs.

It's not so much just music, but that there is really no usage advantage for a consumer whatsoever to having speakers on the rear. If they put stereo speakers on the rear, then they'd have to have a third on the front for calls anyway. If you have the phone sitting on a desk face up, then the sound of everything that's not a call using the earpiece is distorted. If you have it face down, then you have to flip the phone over to actually see or use anything. No one watches a movie on their phone with the speakers facing them instead of the screen. Rear speakers just aren't practical. Bottom speakers like the G2, Nexus 5, iPhone and such, are better, but not by much. Understanding how sound waves work, unless you are actually pointing the bottom of the phone at yourself, you'll never be getting the sound directly; you'd always be getting a reflection of the wavefronts. Stereo speakers purely on the bottom are too close together to really make a difference, and if you had a speaker on the bottom and one on top then you'd be sending sound waves in completely opposite directions. I'm rather interested in how weird a device that did that might sound. Front facing speakers have the least amount of tampering due to the environment in most cases. I don't watch movies on my mobile devices. You might not either. But since Netflix has over 50 million installs, I'm pretty sure there are a large number of people who do, and any speaker set-up that isn't front facing is sub-optimal. HTC choose the speakers to be in that position, because it's the most practical. And they aren't the only ones, Sony's starting to use front facing too.

Personally, I prefer to listen to music with headphones, because I have a really nice pair, and it's more personal you could say, but I wear headphones like at least six hours a day, so there are times when I'd rather use speakers, because I'm rather fatigued. It is those times that I always use my M8 over my Nexus 7 to listen to music. I'd rather use my phone to listen to music then have to leave my tablet face down and flip it over anytime I want to change the song. As an added bonus, since the Dot View case doesn't let the phone lay flat when the flap is flipped to the back (ugh), it actually acts like a kickstand ((yay!) still not as good as a dedicated kickstand)), so I can actually leave it on a table and have the sound still somewhat directed towards me. But that's just me though.

Then they should have had the speakers at the back. You have earphones in for 6 hrs a day? God, you must have a lot of free time?

 

[Prinny Mask]

Then they should have had the speakers at the back. You have earphones in for 6 hrs a day? God, you must have a lot of free time?

I didn't even know this myself until I watched the iFixit video after that post, but it probably wouldn't of even been possible to put the speakers on the back, because the entire area from the rear camera up is a second smaller circuit board that's on top of the speaker internals. There isn't enough room for them to swap positions and put that circuit board where the top speaker is, and it would probably need even more room for a third speaker as the earpiece. It looks like the only other thing they could've done is had one speaker on the bottom in the back, and that might be able to get rid of half the bottom speaker space judging by how the internals look. And keep in mind that HTC is using the front facing speakers to market their phones now. They can't really market these really good speakers on the back of a phone when almost all promotional material is going to emphasize the front. They can't match Samsung's budget, so they focus on it as a feature not so much as "we both have this, but ours is better" but like, "we have this, and they don't."

If you watch the video I posted above, you can see why the phone is this long. I think it's really tall too, but I'm more concerned about width than length. I, personally, can deal with a tall phone, like the M8 is, but I can't deal with a wide phone, which is why I don't really consider Note class devices. If a device is tall, I only really have to deal with it when pulling down the notifications or hitting a top-mounted power button (ugh). But I'm always feeling how wide a device is when I hold it, and then it affects how easily you can reach the other side of the screen. The M8 is really tall, but it's not that wide at all, which is why I'm okay with it.

Yeah, my latest class last semester ended at 6:30, so my day is done after that, and I usually sleep no sooner than 1. So that right there is six hours. And that's not including the time between class, before class, when I don't even have class, during break at work, or just generally at all. Besides class and work, it's honestly pretty much all free time.