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Families will LOVE the Amazing Music & Gorgeous Photos: Review of the HTC One (M8) Harman/Kardon

 

I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting (#MC) for Sprint. I received a product sample to facilitate my review and to thank me for participating.

As a Sprint Ambassador, my family and I are trying out a few different devices this year and sharing all our ‘yea!’ and ‘nay’ moments.  Our goal is to provide you with some of the details on the newest tech gadgets for tweens, teens and parents.

When we received our next mobile device to test, my kids were elated.  Sprint sent us an HTC One (M8) Harman/Kardon Edition phone which has some cutting-edge technology that restores all types of compressed digital music to give you an amazing listening experience. 

So why were the kids so excited about this phone?  They love music 🙂

 

The Best Sound on a Cell Phone

My daughter’s first idea was to play the “Frozen” soundtrack via the phone (who would have guessed that?! wink, wink). 

We weren’t sure how transfering our music would go but I’m thrilled to say that the HTC manager on the phone talks to iTunes so you can quickly import your playlists. 

Yea! and double yea! because busy families need that type of easy-to-use technology.

The sound quality is just AMAZING! 

Really, it’s like I’m sitting next to a stereo speaker or surround-sound at the movies.  It has such a crystal clear audio to it whether we’re using it at home or in the car.  So much better than listening to the car radio and a vast improvement from our iPod experience. 

You know how some music can sound kind of tinnie — have that echo to it — you will NOT have that at all! 

So now my only problem is getting the phone back from the kids so I can make a call or use the camera on it 🙂

 

HTC One with Galaxy

HTC One with my Galaxy — same photo from same location — much more coverage on the HTC.

 

As part of their new Sound Sessions program, Sprint is giving customers access to Spotify’s catalogue too.

Access to Spotify is awesome!  No matter where you are, you’ll have the music you love.  And there’s no ads — something else I appreciate as a parent who’s kids always seem to tune in to those commercials that you DON’T want them to hear.

Spotify has a wide variety of channels with more than 20 million songs.  So the 80’s channel for my husband, Disney music for my daughter and tons of rock for my son.  And for me, Frank Sinatra — making dinner has never been nicer 😉

We also received a Harman Kardon Onyx Studio speaker.

The speaker is blue-tooth enabled which means NO WIRES!  Happy dance! 

We can use it anywhere — like out on the deck during dinner!  Or I can move it to my daughter’s room (and close the door) when she wants to hear “Let it Go” just one more time.

And we’ve even tried to have phone wars to see if we can over-ride each other’s music — but no go! 

When I’m playing Frank while getting dinner ready, the kids can only listen.  They can’t switch it to their music (double yea! because that always happens in my house).

And talk about volume — this thing can ROCK!  We had it outside on our deck and the kids could hear it upstairs in their rooms with the windows closed.  It will be great for large groups since the sound travels so nicely — or to wake the kids up when they just won’t get out of bed on a Saturday morning 😉

 

Harbor shot with HTC One

Awesome Photos on Your Phone

As amazing as the music quality is on the phone, my favorite feature is actually the camera — it’s so easy to use and has some great components!

You can see how great the photo quality is with the above picture — the various colors in the water get picked up with the camera and it was a really cloudy day (you can see the dark cloud in the upper right that was hovering over us as I snapped the picture).

The camera has options for dual capture, panoramic, selfie, video and zoe camera.  With the dual camera, you can drag the inside camera box to different areas of your photo and make it larger or smaller.

 

Rainbow over bay with HTC One

It even captured the colors of the rainbow we saw over the bay!

The panoramic feature takes a 360 photo!  And it’s so easy – just match up the red boxes in your viewer and you can take an amazing shot!  As a frequent traveler, this is an amazing feature!  It would have been great to have on our last vacation to the Rocky Mountains when we were standing on the top of the mountain and turning in all directions to get a good picture.

With the dual capture feature, I also LOVE that you can snap pictures using the volume button on the top of the phone — so much easier than trying to balance the phone and hit the camera icon.

 

HTC One with iPhone5

HTC One next to our iPhone5 — huge difference in screen size!

 

Additional Details for the HTC One Harmon/Kardon

The phone is really light with a long, sleek body.  It fits in my hands better than my Galaxy and is a lot larger and longer than my son’s iPhone5. It has a 5 inch screen that’s full HD.  My daughter noticed this right away when she pulled up a video — “Mom, it look’s like it’s on our tv!”

The homescreen comes a little cluttered for our taste (my teen noticed this right away) but it’s an easy fix.  We love the ease in moving the apps and buttons around the screen. 

There’s a nice variety of backgrounds and you can set the homescreen to show the latest news in addition to time and weather (which is a nice feature for me since I can never seem to keep up with current events).

Overall, it’s an excellent choice for families!  Great music quality, amazing camera and if the kids like to watch videos or enjoy playing games, they’ll love the larger HD screen and the nice size of the phone. 

 

It you have an HTC One, I’d love to know what you like about your phone —

be sure to leave us a comment!