Back from the Grave
The HTC One M8 arrived in April, 2014, sporting a 5" 1080p SupreLCD display, a Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor, Adreno 330 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The model you see here has 32GB of storage, although 16GB was also available. It belonged to my wife, and she says it was the phone she loved most of all.
I believe I bought this phone as a gift for her sometime in June, replacing an earlier HTC One from 2013. The M8 was to be the start of HTC's return to prominence after several years of decline; unfortunately, the inherent goodness of this phone wasn't enough.
In 2015, my wife was carrying this phone in her purse, and a bottle of milk that was next to it leaked, flooding her bag and completely soaking the phone. It was dead. Or, as we shall see, only mostly dead.
About a year later, the phone was brought out and plugged in, but it was still mostly dead.
In early 2017, one of our kids found the phone and plugged it in. A glimmer of life appeared- it started charging! And we got it to turn on, connect to Wifi, and even pull down updates. But again, the mostly dead phone wouldn't charge beyond 1%, and would die within a minute or two when unplugged from power.
Mostly dead, but now partly alive, I figured it might be worth the time and money to see if a professional shop could bring it all the way back. The battery in this phone is sealed, the way most modern phones are, so you can't access the compartment without special tools. I found a phone repair shop that would take a look at the battery. Since a brand new, old stock One M8 goes for only $175 or so, the repair would have to be much less than that.
Unfortunately, they tried a replacement battery, but even that wouldn't hold a charge. So the problem must be somewhere on the logic board. The repair shop guy didn't charge me for the work he did since he couldn't get it fixed. He put the old battery back in, I took it home, and put it back in a drawer.
A few days ago, I was digging in my tech junk closet; the sort of place you put all the stray cables, adapters and miscellaneous doodads that you should probably throw away but tell yourself to keep, just in case. Here sat the old One M8, and why not give it one last chance, before sending it to the great recycler in the sky? (Actually, electronics recycling is often done in nightmarish landfills in the third world, where peasants and children pick through all the mountains of phones and computers, looking for salable components, exposing themselves to mercury and battery acid, casualties of our disposable culture.)
The good old HTC One M8 was plugged in to power, and just as before, it showed the charging icon. Soon 1% appeared, again as before. But what was this? 2%! And then 3% and so on, and a loud "Eureka!" escaped my lips (yes, I actually shouted "eureka" like a crazy person). My wife called from the other room, to know what the matter was, and I carried the phone to her with wild eyes and the grin of a madman.
And so this old, mostly dead phone is back from the grave. It charges and keeps a charge like it was brand new. I rooted it and installed a custom ROM running the latest version of Android, and everything works. It is surprisingly not terrible to use; in fact, performance is acceptable for virtually any modern application, with the exception of high GPU games. In fits and starts, this good old phone found the will to live, over the course of 3 years.
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