Besides launching their present flagship smartphone, Motorola released another cheaper and smaller device known as Moto X Play. The HTC One M8 was released last year; let us take a look at how it fares against this new contender from Motorola.
When you compare both of these devices by design and form factor, you will hardly notice any similarities. The M8 comes with a classy polish and an aluminum body with its premium builds materials highlighted by rounded edges.
It is available in three different colors of silver, gold and gunmetal gray. In case of the Moto X Play, the only metal you will notice in this device is the frame.
However, users who are looking for a unique device will find it interesting since it can be highly customized using the Moto Maker Website. There are many different materials that users can pick from like silicon, wood and leather for the back panel and also choose from a wide variety of colors with its lenses and metal accents.
The HTC One M8 comes with a 5 inch super LCD3 screen which has a full-HD display resolution of 1080×1920 pixels with a 441ppi pixel density. Compared to that, the Moto X Play has a bigger 5.5inch capacitive display with full-HD resolution, similar to the M8 but with a lower 403ppi pixel density. Under the hood, the Moto X Play beats the HTC One M8 hands-down.
This is because it is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset along with an octa-core CPU with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.0 GHz. The graphics solution is handled by an Adreno 405 GPU.
The One M8 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset, with its four cores clocked at 2.3GHz and includes an Adreno 330 graphics solution. Both of these devices allow up to 128GB of storage and have 2GB of RAM each. The HTC One M8 is available at a price of $199 with a two-year contract while the unlocked version of Moto X Play is priced at $300.
In a weird turn of events, HTC M7, M8 and M9 users have grouped together and raised their voices at how HTC has been bombarding them with notification ads for a Fantastic Four theme that apparently, these users did not ask for.
Google has banned most Android developers from promoting their Google Play Store applications through Notification ads. Sadly, the latest push notification from HTC is nothing but an ad for a ‘Fantastic Four’ theme designed for HTC’s Sense Home. Indirectly, this ad seems to be promoting the ‘Fantastic Four’ Film but this could provide HTC with the technical loophole they need, in order to get around stringent Google Policies.
However, the users who weren’t aware of any such potential strategy were in for an unpleasant surprise when they saw this ad pop up on their devices. As a result, most users took to Reddit and found out that a lot of HTC owners are facing the same issue. One user even complained that HTC is going desperate for money and that this type of native advertising messes with user experience and surely doesn’t help manufacturing any brand loyalty.
Another HTC user complained h/she loved the M8 due to its sturdy nature and reliable approach. However, due to this recent development, this said commenter will now think before acquiring any HTC devices in future.
There were also complaints about this ad getting pushed into the phone, even after paying for it and using a custom launcher at the same time.
Earlier in May, HTC announced that it would be using its BlinkFeed social and news aggregator app to test a limited number of promotions.