For the last two months, I’ve had the chance to test out the HTC One M8 and the RE camera. These are both great devices, and I was excited to try something from HTC, which is a company that I believe makes truly great technology. My sister has had the HTC One M7 for a year and a half, and has loved using it. She bought it after I forced her off her Droid 4 and onto a Z10, which wasn’t as appealing to her. I’ve been looking forward to testing out the One M8, since everyone has been talking so highly of it. 

Then there’s the HTC RE camera. It’s an interesting little device, and the shape reminds me of a submarine’s scope. The idea of the camera is that you can take it anywhere, including underwater! After having it for almost two months, I still don’t fully understand the point of it. Obviously I have my phone with me everywhere I go, and there has never been a situation where I wanted to take a picture but didn’t want to use my phone. But I really wanted to understand this little gizmo, so I took it to Florida with me, hoping I would get a perfect opportunity to use it. I brought it with when we spent New Years Eve in downtown Orlando, figuring it was better to have that knocked out of my hand than my phone. I took numerous pictures, often of the same thing, since there isn’t a way to see how the picture looks. It’s like film cameras all over again! When I got back to the hotel and had a chance to look at the pictures, I was disappointed. Most of them were either blurry or I had cut out half of the subject. This is the whole point of a viewfinder. After this, I didn’t use the RE camera very much, and instead used either my iPhone or HTC One.

Now comes the phone. The HTC One M8 is absolutely gorgeous. The black screen with the dark grey metal surrounding it makes it seem as if it’s constantly in stealth mode. Which it probably is. This is easily the best looking phone on the market right now.

I would love to say that the phone operates as flawlessly as it looks, but unfortunately that’s not the case. I used the HTC as a GPS many times, especially since it came with unlimited data. But doing this would more often than not cause the phone to crash, even if there were no other background apps running. It seemed like the phone was easily overwhelmed, and I couldn’t figure out how to calm it down. One of the features I really enjoyed, though, was that you could wake the phone up the same way you would wake up a BlackBerry 10 device, by swiping up. This feature went further; if you swiped left it brought you to BlinkFeed, and right brought you to Google. There’s a phone for everyone, and as much as I loved looking at the One M8, I preferred using an iPhone. But that’s why there are so many options out there!

The RE camera is a strange idea. Maybe better for someone who is more active? I still haven’t figured out its purpose. The HTC One M8 is a gorgeous phone that works well, but doesn’t live up to my expectations. Maybe because I still can’t “like” Android. There are so many great features of it, but it seems like they’re all mashed together in an unorganized fashion. Lollipop could change my mind, and I’m looking forward to using it, but for now I’ll stick with my 6.