The HTC One (M8) is undoubtedly one of thee best designed devices ever! It’s simply a piece or technological art. Despite the rave reviews for the design, there has one ongoing complaint about one design element on the phone, the seemingly useless black bar below the screen.
On the old HTC One, the black bar housed the capacitive buttons; however, the new device uses onscreen buttons. You would think that HTC would have ditched the bar to try and make the device more compact but instead they left it to house their HTC logo. Up till now HTC had been rather quiet as to the design choice but one HTC Exec has finally spoken up explaining their choice. Here’s what he had to say via a Tweet:
While a response on the design choice is definitely welcomed and (to a degree) helpful, it does have the smell of excuse on it. Couldn’t they have just stuffed the extra circuitry elsewhere? After all, the phone is pretty lengthy so to me it seems feasible to do without the bar.
The one reason that Gordon mentions that does make some sense to me is that the antennae is beneath that bar. As you all know, metal devices often face reception issues. Housing the antennae in a non metal portion of the phone should allow for better reception. Of course this is just a theory on my part but it’s the only one that really makes sense to me.
What do you guys think? Does this response from HTC satisfy you or is it just a poor band-aid?
[Twitter]