Both Sony and HTC have had plenty of positive feedback for their last-gen flagships, so it’s no surprise that their latest hardware seeks to refine the same recipe further. With Sony this is the Sony Xperia Z2, launched at Mobile World Congress, while HTC has just launched the HTC One M8. How do they stack up?
Design
Sony’s design hasn’t changed much from the Xperia Z1. The Xperia Z2 still features an aluminium surround with reinforced Dragontrail glass on both front and back panels. The handset has become a bit larger to carry a 5.2-inch display, while the panelled detailing along its contoured edges has been highlighted with some contrasting colouration.
Aside from this it’s more or less business as usual, but that’s not a problem because Sony was already producing a stunning and premium-grade product as far as the build is concerned.
The same could be said of HTC’s One, but in fact the company has discovered a few ways of enhancing the design for its second iteration. HTC has re-shaped pretty much every facet of the One M8 with the intention of making it a much more comfortable device to hold – edges and corners have been tapered and the unibody now wraps around from the back up the phone’s flanks in one piece making things nice and solid.
HTC has opted for a brushed metal texture this time round to make things more visually interesting, but has added a clear coating to achieve a smooth finish. The phone has the same capped design at each end with a punched front-facing speaker grille.
While the Xperia Z2 uses the same purple, black and white colour options as its predecessor, HTC has specifically chosen colour variants which compliment the metal build: Metal Grey, Amber Gold and Arctic Silver.
Display
The Xperia Z2’s screen has grown from the Xperia Z1’s 5-inch span to a 5.2-inch setup. It’s an IPS LCD Triluminos touchscreen with Sony’s X-Reality Engine, this combination of tech offers good colour saturation and brightness, while the full HD 1080p resolution gives a pixel density of 424 pixels-per-inch (ppi). With the IPS screen in use, the Xperia Z2 has much better colour reproduction and wider viewing angles than earlier models.
The HTC One M8 has a 5-inch display, up from the HTC One’s 4.7-inch panel. HTC hasn’t explained what screen tech is in use here, but claims it’s a new LCD technology which improves on earlier HTC offerings. It’s difficult to argue really with such high quality visuals pouring out of the HTC One M8’s fascia. It’s bright, sharp and colourful with a full HD 1080p resolution at 441ppi.
Processor
Both handsets use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 quad-core chip clocked at 2.3GHz, however, the Xperia Z2 has 3GB of RAM while the HTC One M8 has 2GB. In HTC’s case this is still a decent upgrade, however, as the HTC One came with the older Snapdragon 600 chip. On both devices performance is what we’ve come to expect of the Snapdragon 800 series, meaning things run very speedily indeed and high-performance tasks are managed with no issues.
Camera
Sony was already onto a winner with the Xperia Z1’s 20.7-megapixel camera and has used much the same setup in the Xperia Z2. It features an Exmor RS back-illuminated sensor (BSI), an f/2.0 aperture, a BIONZ dedicated image processor and Sony’s G-Lens, all of which means it churns out some pretty good pictures and video. As well as the same 1080p support offered by the Xperia Z1, the Xperia Z2 adds 4K video recording support.
The HTC One M8 uses a modified version of the imaging hardware seen on its predecessor – a 4-megapixel “Ultrapixel” camera with an f/2.0 aperture. However, this time round the camera lens is joined by an additional sensor – a depth sensor, to be precise. This setup means the camera can take a sweep of spatial data and enables a few extra features which make use of it. Primarily, this is the “U Focus” feature which acts like a Lytro camera in enabling you to re-select the focal point of the image at any point after capture. The front-facing camera has been upgraded to 5-megapixels with some dedicated selfie capture modes included in HTC’s imaging software package.
Software
Both HTC and Sony’s new Android UIs make use of Google’s visual tweaks to the software, with things like transparent navigation and notification bars. However, little else has changed for either of the custom interfaces. The Sony UI looks and functions a lot like the previous iteration. HTC Sense offers greater customisation than before with the addition of colour-based themes and custom font options. BlinkFeed is also no longer the default Homescreen and customising the content feed is easier than before.
Other features
Both handsets come with 16GB of onboard storage and microSD support for cards up to 128GB, they’ve also each got a raft of connectivity options including 4G and 3G, Wi-Fi (Direct/Hotspot), DLNA, GPS, Bluetooth and MHL TV-Out.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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