One M7 – SomeGadgetGuy

April 3, 2015

HTC Sense Home Arrives for One M7 & M8 via Google Play Updates

Continuing their trend of delivering updates to services via app updates, HTC has unleashed Sense 7 for the M7 and the M8.

One of the more anticipated new features from the M9, Sense Home provides easy tools to customize and skin the Sense skin overlay on HTC handsets. They’re also building a community around sharing wallpapers and skins.

Sense is also more predictive now and, like launcher Aviate, it will try to offer up apps and services you might want to use in that moment, while also using your location for restaurant suggestions.

It’s also a nice consideration that this functionality is coming not only to last year’s M8, but is running pretty snappily on my two year old M7.

Hit the Google Play store for an update!

June 5, 2014

AT&T HTC One M7 Updated with Sense 6 – New Blinkfeed and Camera App

Playing with this year’s flagship devices, it’s been great going back to see how good our phones were last year. In an era of premier phones all sporting 5+ inch screens, the HTC M7 stands as one of the last high end phones with a SLIGHTLY smaller screen. It’s a joy to use one handed, so that makes updates like these even more enjoyable.

HTC has really stepped up on the support front, and are following Google’s example in separating apps and services from full OS updates. The M7 is now getting updated to the newest version of Sense (the skin HTC developed to customize their phone experience). Now services like Blinkfeed and HTC’s TV remote app can be updated through Google Play. This brings much faster support to the ecosystem, as individual services can get updates and bug fixes without having to push OTA updates through carriers.

The M7 gets a great new Blinkfeed, it adopts the nicer camera app from the M8, and a few other goodies alongside the normal slate of patches and bug fixes. It breaths a little more life into on of the best Android’s from last year, and should prove to keep the phone running current software longer into the future.

You can check to see if you have the update by jumping into your settings, and AT&T’s changelog is below.

Continue reading “AT&T HTC One M7 Updated with Sense 6 – New Blinkfeed and Camera App”

April 22, 2014

HTC One M8 Camera outclassed by Galaxy S5, and it has NOTHING to do with MegaPixels…

Let’s get this out of the way right now. The One M8 camera is good. Maybe it’s even “very good”, but over the last year we’ve seen some excellent cameras bolted onto the backs of our phones by companies like Sony and Nokia.

The M7 was my favorite camera on an Android phone of last year, and was only bested by the likes of Nokia. It lost the resolution battle with only a 4MP sensor, but the combo of larger “UltraPixels” and Optical Image Stabilization made it one of the best devices to shoot on in indoor and low light environments. Outdoor pics were very good, low light pics were gorgeous, and video was nicely smoothed out by the stabilizing hardware.

My expectations were tremendously high for the M8.

Continue reading “HTC One M8 Camera outclassed by Galaxy S5, and it has NOTHING to do with MegaPixels…”

April 18, 2014April 17, 2014

How much better are the BoomSound Speakers on the HTC One M8 vs the M7?

The M7 was a revolution. Stereo front facing speakers on a phone. With one listen, it became my preferred multimedia mobile, and the standard by which I judged every phone and tablet which followed it. Every single audio review I’ve done since has been normalized against the M7.

It should come as no surprise that a newer phone will have better features than its predecessor. We call that “progress”, but considering how stellar the audio playback was on the M7, many of us had doubts that the M8 would be demonstrably better.

Well we were wrong.

Take a listen for yourself as we pit the former heavyweight up against the new champion. The M7 is dead. Long live the M8.

HTC One M7 Speaker Playback Test