HTC’s One M8 has turned a lot of heads since it was announced back at March, but Xiaomi Mi4 has also garnered a lot of attention for its build quality, high-end specs and low price.

Both the One M8 and Mi4 were designed and built with incredible precision, they are one of the two best looking Android handsets around today. Still their design is quite different. The Xiaomi Mi4 has a more boxy industrial design, it’s like a strange balance between and iPhone 5S and Lumia Icon. The worst part of the Mi4 design is the glossy plastic on the back side, it makes the phone unnecessarly slick. The One M8 as many of you already know has a curved design, which doesn’t exactly help with using the phone while laying on a flat surface, but the casing is almost entirely metal and the back side sort of fades into the sides and front. This makes the device look thinner and lighter than the Xiaomi Mi4, which isn’t exactly true. The HTC M8 is marginally taller, thicker and heavier than the Mi4. Despite these differences, both have chamfered edges on the metal trim and have similar placement of certain buttons and ports around their edges. The major difference in design is speaker placement, the One M8 duo front-facing boom sound speakers are positioned upfront, while the Mi4 single speaker is found along the bottom edge.

Internally these two phones have very few similarities and the Mi4 seems to have the upper hand, both have the Snapdragon 801 chipset with Quad-Core Krait 400, but the HTC One M8 is clocked at 2.3 Ghz while the Xiaomi Mi4 is clocked at 2.5 Ghz. The M8 has 2 GB Ram, 32 GB of fixed storage with a micro SD card slot for up to 128 GB’s more, it has 2 rear image sensors for its duo camera setup – 4.1 MP and 2 MP for dept information, and the front camera is 5 MP, and the integrated battery is 2,600 mAh. The Xiaomi Mi4 has 3 GB of Ram to work with 16 GB or 32 GB of storage but no option to expand and a 13 MP rear camera, its front facing camera is 8 MP and the Mi4 has a much stronger battery at 3,080 mAh. Connectivity options are similar as well, both have WiFi AC, Infrared and Bluetooth 4.0 but the M8 has NFC while the Mi4 does not.

In terms of display, both have 5 inch 1080p displays. The HTC One M8’s is an S-LCD 3 while the Xiomi Mi4 display is aa IPS LCD. Density’s are exactly the same 441 PPI, tho you may feel you are getting more bang for you buck out of the Mi4 since the M8 has on-screen buttons, which take out a fair amount of space, this all comes down to preference. The clarity, color reproduction, contrast and brightnesses are very similar, however the Mi4’s display is noticeably warmer than the M8’s, i prefer the display of the M8 as it appears more vibrant and natural. Choosing hardware between these two is difficult, on build quality and finish i give the upper hand to the HTC One M8, it has a slightly nicer display and feels smaller even tho it’s actually larger. If your are purely after specifications the Xiaomi Mi4 takes the cake.

As far as software goes both devices ship with Android KitKat 4.4.2, but to no surprise the software looks completely different. The Mi4 comes running MIUI5, unlike most versions of Android we are used to, the MIUI doesn’t ship with an application drawer, of course you can add one if you like and this Chinese variant doesn’t come with Google Play Services preinstalled – you have to add that to. The MIUI is all about customization, you can download free or premium themes from the dedicated theme store, these are heavily customized and can completely change the appearance of your phones UI. Sense 6 version on the M8 is one of my favorite custom version Android to date. It looks a lot like Sense 5 which shipped last years HTC One M7, but it’s new and improved. BlinkFeed on of the main features has more channels and it is more useful than ever. In the settings app you will find tiny little tweaks that truly make sense for a great experience. Xiaomi MIUI isn’t bad at all, it is just different and doesn’t feel that polished. With Snapdragon 801 inside both handsets slice through every day activities without a hitch -scrolling, zooming and launching applications are all smooth and instantaneous. Lag is practically non-existent but the M8 feels a bit snappier in most situations. Without a doubt the HTC One M8 takes the cake with speaker quality, it sounds more crisp and several times louder than the Mi4.

Comparing the One M8 and the Mi4 cameras.Despite having a high resolution camera the Xiaomi Mi4 actually doesn’t take noticeably better photos than the M8. The HTC One M8 camera provides a more balanced, true-light photos while the Mi4 is low on contrast. The M8 usually over expose the photos and it obviously doesn’t have nearly as much resolution to work with, and it appears that the M8 uses some artificial sharpening effects to make up for its lack of resolution. Either way the HTC One M8 photos look better than the Mi4’s especially in low light situations. The Mi4 is a mess in low light photography, the M8 isn’t the best out there but it generally captures far more light in the Auto mode and it doesn’t loose as much saturation as the Mi4. If we are talking viewfinder software, hands down it goes to the Sense 6. The HTC One M8 Sense camera is fantastic. The same goes for the front cameras, the M8 front camera is 5 MP while the Mi4’s is 8 MP. High resolution doesn’t help the Mi4 take better selfies, the colors are dull and the images with the front camera are washed out. Selfies taken with the HTC One M8 are actually quite nice.

So which smartphone do we choose. Quite obviously the M8, but that doesn’t mean that the Xiaomi Mi4 is a bad phone, quite the contrary, but based on availability, hardware, software and performance the HTC One M8 is a more complete package. Simple way to put it, the One M8 feels more refined, but Xiaomi Mi4 isn’t far behind.

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