HTC 8S review – best Windows phone for its price

HTC 8S Review: Recently HTC and Nokia launched their Windows Phone 8 in India. In HTC we got two mobile phone with Windows Phone 8 OS. HTC 8S is priced lower than HTC 8x. HTC 8S is a relatively low-end of a product priced only Rs.20,000. Want to know how is the actual performance of this phone? Lets have a quick look at it.

Most of the WP8 phones looks alike. HTC 8S has a color shell design. This color will stimulate the customer to choose this mobile. My opinion about this mobile is, it is best looking WP8 phone. It is not because of two-color mix gives users more visual impact, compared to other WP8 products HTC 8S has a compact body and more lovable.

Button design is still a conventional layout of WP8 three touch keys for Right, Back & Window located at the bottom of the screen. Power button, Volume controls and camera shortcuts were at the top right of the screen.

SIM Slot and microSD slot

I actually spent nearly four minutes to find the SIM card slot. This HTC 8S SIM card slot and MicroSD is hidden in the bottom of the protective cover as you see in the image below.

This design is really inconvenient because it is not too easy to open. I managed to find a lot of tools to open this cover.

Screen

HTC 8S is equipped with 4 inches WVGA screen resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. This phone has very good brightness and viewing angle screen and performance under the sun. Screen resistance towards fingerprint and oil is very low.

Software and hardware:

There is difference between Lumia 920 WP8 interface and HTC 8S interface. HTC has included their own software which is not available in Nokia Win 8 mobiles. This mobile is coupled with Microsoft's own Office and outlook. File transfer can be easily done using improved WP8 Zune. Upto 2.6GB of this mobile is allocated for boot and only 1GB of space is available to the user which is obviously not enough.

HTC 8S uses Qualcomm Xiao Long S4 MSM8227 dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz.

Camera:

The emerge of Nokia PureView technology made the camera ability of phone to reach unexpected height. The camera of 8S is not very strong as the predecessor. This mobile is equipped with 5-megapixel camera but it doesn't not have a front cam disappoints buyer. This camera can shoot a 2592 x 1944 pixels photos. There are several options available in camera such as control the white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, ISO and face detection.

With this camera you can only shoot 720p video. The overall effect of the video is good. There is no image stabilizer and If you're shooting a video during walk or ride, you will find a very obvious lens jitter amplitude and frequency.

Battery backup:

8S battery performnce did not achieve my desired extent. With routine jobs such as WiFi, Skype, Youtube and microblogging I found it operates for about 15-18 hours. The bad news about HTC 8S is you can not replace the battery. If you are a severe mobile user then you need to carry a external power backup everytime with you.

Conclusion:

8S is a good enough phone, if you want to experience Windows Phone OS. HTC 8S will be definitely your first choice if you are seeking a mobile phone priced with Rs.20000.

If you think you are bored using Windows phone then wait for January 30 2013. RIM is going to launch its new operating system BB10. It is capable of threatening the market position of WP system.