With the HTC 8X taking the top spot of HTC's Windows Phone 8 collection, the HTC 8S, or Windows Phone 8S by HTC as it’s officially known, sits a step or two down from the top. It's an entry-level Windows Phone and comes in at entry-level prices.?
It's part of that relatively exclusive club, offering the latest software from Microsoft, promising a simpler approach to smartphones, a people-centric experience, with less time faffing and more time being productive.
But can the HTC 8S stand up against the devices from Nokia, which add more on the software side and will this relatively low spec device give you a Windows Phone experience it savour? And will it stand up against the sort of experience you'll get from the abundance of affordable Androids?
Design
The Windows Phone 8S by HTC is a good-looking phone. The two-tone colour scheme, pairing blues, might not be for everyone, but we like the slim profile, the light weight and the tactile finish.
It's a compact handset, thanks to that 4-inch display, with dimensions of 120.5 x 63 x 10.28 and weighs only 113g. At that size, it nestles nicely into your hand, so it's easy to grip and slips easily into any pocket or bag.
The build quality is good, it feels solid enough, but perhaps loses out on some of the quirks that Nokia offers, like changeable covers for example. Instead, the HTC 8S is a sealed unit, with only the bottom of the phone popping off to reveal slots for the micro SIM and microSD cards.
The phone exhibits the hallmarks of HTC design, with micro-drilled speaker holes at the bottom rear of the phone along with HTC and Beats Audio branding. The soft curves of the rear makes it look at little like the iPod touch fourth-gen, with a simple elegance to the lines, making this a phone we can help but admire.
Hardware and display
Marking this out as an entry-level phone, however, is the hardware specs. Sitting at the core of the HTC 8S is a 1GHz dual-core Qualcomm S4 chipset, with 512MB of RAM. That’s a little on low side for a modern Windows Phone, the result being that it noticeably lacks the snap of the top devices.?
Equally you only get 4GB of internal storage, but as mentioned, you can expand this with microSD, so it's worth picking up a high capacity card too to remove your storage woes.
The display is a 4-inch Super LCD with a pixel resolution of 800 x 480. That was the resolution of the first run of Windows Phone 7 handsets and doesn't compete with some of the sharper displays out there visually. But Windows Phone's big bold tiles mean that resolution isn't a huge priority in many daily tasks.
Where it does become more limiting is in things like webpages, where you'll have to zoom regularly to resolve fine detail on pages. The text isn't as sharp as those 720p displays that are on the top handsets.
However, the colours are nice and strong; blacks could be deeper and the whites brighter, but otherwise viewing angles are good and there's plenty of brightness on offer to remain visible outdoors.
We had no problems with reception on the HTC 8S, the call quality was great with no concerns reported from callers and plenty of volume on offer. We found the battery performance to be good too, the 1700mAh getting us through a typical day without the worry of going flat. Of course, this depends on your usage.
Windows Phone 8, with a dab of HTC
Unlike Android, Windows Phone is designed to be very much a uniform user experience across devices. Manufacturers can add to what Microsoft offers and for HTC that means you get access to an HTC app with weather, stocks and a news feed, with corresponding live tile.?
You also get a Photo Enhancer, lifted straight from the HTC Android experience, that will let you add effects to an existing photo, but that's all, although Windows Phone 8 has it's own physical photo editing options, such as crop, rotate and auto correct.
We've reviewed Windows Phone 8 in detail previously, so we've not going to repeat all the details here: it's well worth reading our full Windows Phone 8 review if you're new to Microsoft's mobile platform.?
READ: Windows Phone 8 review?
Where iOS on the iPhone takes a rather static approach, with its grid, or folders, of icons, and Android gives you customisation galore, Windows Phone is distinctly different. The live tiles give you an at-a-glance user interface on your homepage, so you can see what's going on quickly and easily, very much as you can with Android's widgets.?
It's big, bold and interesting, a playful take on an OS that was once very business-oriented. But although we're now dealing with a user experience that is much simpler and immediate - ideal for consumers - many of those core Microsoft experiences provide the backbone of this mobile offering.
Not only have you got great integration to Office, with SkyDrive across the device, but with the birth of Windows 8, there's a feeling that Microsoft's ecosystem is now more universal and attractive. The phone gives you some of the experiences you'll take from the Xbox, with branding like Xbox Music, swinging in to reinforce the message.?
The result is an OS that feels more complete within its own universe. It might not match everything that Google offers through Android, or Apple offers through iTunes, but there's a refreshing elegance to a lot of what's available. The app design on Windows Phone 8, for example, often visually trumps that of Android and iOS.
If we've one gripe, it's that the search button is a Bing button, rather than context sensitive as Android's was/is. It means that whenever you want to search you have to us the in-app searching. It's a minor point and simply one of preference.
Apps, however, are something of a contentious point on Windows Phone 8. It's difficult to read a review of a Windows Phone 8 device without finding some criticism of the app offering. That's not entirely unjustified, as apps are very much a core part of a modern smartphone and there's a noticeable disparity between iPhone and Android and Windows Phone 8.
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