Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The battery performance of the HTC One E8 is pretty good indeed – perhaps not at the level of the other phones on the market (the Samsung Galaxy S5 is one of the better ones around, for instance) but it still performs remarkably well during testing.
The Extreme Power Saving Mode, enabled by the chipset, is once again in force, meaning that when you get into a situation where the battery is nearly dead, you can enable it to shut the phone down to all but the most rudimentary tasks, such as calling, text and a teeny bit of web browsing.
The mode isn't designed to give stellar battery life for all time – rather it's meant to be something you use in an emergency, or when you've got a night out after work and can't find your charger.
You know, life or death situations.
It's not perfect though. If you still use the phone at all, the battery will stop drop too fast, but if you want a long-lasting phone on standby, this mode will make the phone icy cold.
Running the standard TechRadar battery test, I found that once again things were acceptable from a media standpoint – this isn't going to be the best phone for watching a movie and getting on with your day, with a significant chunk of battery going to firing up the Super LCD display, but it's a long way from where it was just a year ago, meaning you've got a much leaner media machine under your grasp here.
The essentials
The HTC One E8 follows its metal clad brother in a number of ways, but actually outperforms the M8 in terms of call quality, it seems.
While it's hard to actually quantify, due to not being able to place the same SIM in the two phones at once, I found that in my house, which is a notoriously tricky spot to get any kind of signal, the connection on the One E8 seemed to be superior.
In terms of actual use day to day, the only difference between the E8 and the One M8 is that the phone is slightly harder to hold in the plastic version (if you've gone for the glossy one, that is) but it's nothing to really worry about.
The on screen keyboard is still one of the best on the market from an OEM (although I still rate options like Swiftkey over the inbuilt one here, simply for better word prediction) and the messaging methods are plentiful and mostly well-integrated.
If you want to read more about this – be it the call quality, options during a call, the messaging options or the internet browsing capabilities – then check out that section of the main M8 review to get your fix.
That said, I would like to talk up the screen again, even though it is the same one as found in the One M8. If you're using this phone to browse the internet, the 5-inch display is more than good enough – in fact, it's pin sharp with good colour reproduction to get you right what you need into your eyeballs.
You're now free to go and read more about this in the One M8 review – but you know me, always want to make sure those that hate clicking get the highlights.
