HTC One M9 The HTC One M9 feels smaller than the M8, but
not by much at all. It measures 144.6 x 69.7 x 9.61mm and weighs 157g, so it's
only a minor difference between the two devices - 2mm shaved off the
height, 1mm from the width, and 0.2mm added in thickness.The HTC One M9 inherits its predecessor's stunning metal
design and strong speakers, and has a bright, sharp display. It runs the latest
version of Android, and the new Sense 7 software is simple, responsive and
highly customisable. It's one of the few flagship phones to still feature
expandable storage, and it offers a unique one-year replacement program in the US
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core;
3GB RAM
Qualcomm’s 800-series processors
dominated 2014 flagships, and with good reason. The Galaxy S5, HTC
One M8 and Sony Xperia
Z3 all packed a serious wallop and made mincemeat of intense 3D games and
processor-hungry HD video conversion.
The 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 810
the One M9 totes is Qualcomm’s latest and greatest and provides twice the
number of cores of the M8's 801. Twice the power, then? It doesn’t quite work
that way, I’m afraid.
The Snapdragon 810
uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This let’s a low-powered 1.55GHz quad-core
processor be paired with another, more powerful, 1.96GHz quad-core processor on
the same chipset. The benefits of this aren’t just about increasing power –
last-gen quad-core processors are already powerful – it’s about energy
efficiency. Most of
the common tasks your smartphone does – make calls, send texts, collect sensor
data, listen to music and browse the web – don’t need much power. Using a
mighty processor for these is overkill, and uses more of the battery than it
should. That’s where the LITTLE quad-core comes into play. It takes care of all
those smaller, daily, tasks in a more energy efficient way, thereby conserving
power. It also means that HTC no longer needs the co-processor that handled all
the sensor data on the M9’s predecessor.
The processor is restricted in Power Saver mode. This
means that the HTC One M9 performs differently depending on how much juice
you’re willing to sacrifice.
Let’s leave the benefits to the HTC One M9’s battery life
to one side for a moment and focus on its performance. As you can expect the
Snapdragon 810 and 3GB RAM helps the One M9 fly through common tasks like
flicking through menus, opening apps and browsing the web, regardless of which
quad is being used.
Battery life Battery life on the HTC One M9 should be
brilliant in comparison to what's been before. The Snapdragon 801 chipset
finally made an HTC phone decent at lasting throughout a day last year, and
with a larger power pack and an improvement from Qualcomm things should be
awesome.
Sadly, they're not. I'm not saying that it's a problem and this
phone won't last long enough to tap out a couple of tweets, but the performance
hasn't been moved on much from last year.
The issue is that the phone heats up really easily doing the most
mundane of tasks. Anything that takes a little bit of wireless connection is a
quick way to watch it drop, be it mobile data or listening to music over
headphones.
Where most phones these days won't have much of an issue losing no
more than 10% on my morning commute, even with a bit of video action, the One
M9 has dropped as much as 17% through Bluetooth music streaming and emails,
which is odd as this doesn't usually munch too much power.
The good news is Google's new Android 5.0 gives you a good way of
checking the problems, letting you shut down (or get rid of) the apps which are
misbehaving. However, in this case it's 'Google Services' which is the issue,
elements fundamental to the running of the phone, which means there's not a lot
to be done about it.
I usually see this in the first few days of reviewing, but the
issue has pervaded. Hardcore testing - be it standby, heavy apps, web browsing
and YouTube videos, for instance - has proven the HTC to be a poorer choice
than the rest of the competition, with poorer background battery management.
This means you can't lean on the One M9 too heavily for playing
games or watching videos, which is irritating if you want to have a little bit
of battery left at the end of the day.
Gaming is really heavy on the battery, with a quick 15 minute game
sometimes sucking 10% juice - although the issue is often that mobile games
these days are constantly communicating with servers for online play or in app
purchases, which hurts the battery.
Running TechRadar's standard battery test on the One M9, where we
looped a 90 min full HD video at maximum brightness showed that the new HTC
phone was one of the worst performers of recent times, with 31% of the battery
disappearing.
If you consider that the LG G Flex 2, another big phone on the
market with the Snapdragon 810 chipset, only lost 13% in the same test, then
you'll see that there's something going on with the software here.
I also ran the same test on the newly-Lollipopped HTC One M8 and
HTC One M7, and they managed 24% and 30% respectively - and the phone from 2013
had barely enough battery to make it through the day too. This shows that for
some reason HTC has managed to go backwards in battery life, even with the
larger capacity and theoretically more efficient processor.
I'm confident battery life will improve, but it's actually a small
step back from the One M8, which can be had for nearly half the price of the
new version, and that's just not good enough. The
other big thing here is QuickCharge 2.0 – although this offers a pretty amazing
60% charge in just 30 mins, the charger in the box isn't QuickCharge enabled to
get the maximum speeds on offer.
This is just ludicrous – I thought by this point
that they'd be standard as the tech began appearing in phones last year. It's
really frustrating that you'll need to spend so much more given this is an
already expensive phone.
THE BAD The M9's camera quality and battery life don't measure up to
its competitors. For better or worse, the phone feels like a rerun of last
year's HTC One.
THE BOTTOM
LINE The updated HTC One M9 packs speed and software
improvements into a handset that remains lustworthy in middle age, but it
doesn't exceed the competition where it counts.
Key Features: 20-megapixel
rear camera ; 4-megapixel Ultrapixel front-facing camera; 5-inch 1080p LCD
screen; BoomSound speakers with Dolby Surround; Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, 3GB
RAM; 32GB onboard storage with microSD slot; HTC Sense 7 on Android 5.0
Lollipop
Manufacturer: HTC
VS Samsung Galaxy S6's The new super-skinny build does
mean that this Samsung gets very warm in use, however. Actually, not
warm, it gets plain hot. Finger-burning hot. This is something that's becoming
more and more common with today's increasingly thin smartphones, particularly
those that have metal bodies. But I'm pleased to report that even when it's got
a fever on performance doesn't appear to be affected.
The
upscale Samsung Galaxy S6's smooth glass-and-matte-metal body, improved
fingerprint reader, and convenient new camera shortcut key make the phone a
stunner. Samsung's decluttered take on Android 5.0 brings the beauty inside,
too.
Performance
Octa-core Exynos 7420 big.LITTLE Processor;
Mali
The Galaxy S6 runs Android 5.0
Lollipop integrated with a newly streamlined version of TouchWiz and it’s
incredibly snappy to use. One of the best features is the multi-window
functionality – I used it frequently.
Multi-window lets you open and use
two apps simultaneously by holding down the option button or dragging from the
top left corner of the screen. It’s great for writing an email while checking
details online, or sharing posts from social media while talking about them
with a friend on WhatsApp, for example.
Overall, the streamlined look and feel of the TouchWiz is
a winner. We did experience a couple of instances where downloaded and native
applications would randomly stop working, but we imagine this will be smoothed
out fairly easily with updates.
TouchWiz gets a huge helping hand by the fact this is the
most powerful smartphone on the market right now. Only the HTC One M9, with its
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, gets close to matching its performance.
The credit goes to the 64-bit Samsung
Exynos 7420 octa-core processor and 3GB RAM – it’s the first time Samsung has
used this chip in a phone. It seems that switching away from Qualcomm’s top-end
Snapdragon processor in its flagship phone has paid off handsomely.
The Exynos 7420 processor has an
advantage over the powerful Snapdragon 810 processor used by the HTC One M9
because the chip is smaller and more energy efficient. You can read the
software and performance sections of our Samsung
Galaxy S6 Edge review for
a more detailed breakdown of how it compares to the competition, but needless
to say the S6 impresses.
One of the best demonstrations of the
Galaxy S6’s power is how smoothly it handles graphically intensive games like
Real Racing 3 or Asphalt 8. There are no dropped frames whatsoever and the
games are rendered better than we’ve seen on any other phone. Battery life
Let me put this into
context: it's as good as the HTC One
M9 and iPhone 6 in terms of being able to last just about
through the day. Given that last year we were seeing phones that could easily
make it to bed time without running out of juice, it's maddening that Samsung,
like others, has gone backwards here.
The reason is simple: the battery pack in the new S6 is
smaller than last year, 2550mAh compared to 2800mAh. The reduction is there
solely so Samsung could make a slimmer phone, focusing on design over
functionality. And unlike previous years, the battery can no longer be removed,
taking away one of the big things fans loved about the phones. BUT,Longtime fans will bristle at the Galaxy S6's nonremovable battery and absent expandable storage. The phone has an intensely reflective backing and looks embarrassingly like the iPhone 6. Battery life, while good, falls short of last year's Galaxy.
THE BOTTOM LINE Worldly looks and top-notch specs make the impressive, metal Samsung Galaxy S6 the Android phone to beat for 2015. Key Features: 5.1-inch 1440 x 2560 resolution screen;
Octa-core Exynos 7420 chipset; Wireless Charging; 3GB RAM; 2,550mAh
non-removable battery; Android 5.0 L with TouchWiz; Samsung Pay; IR Blaster
Manufacturer: Samsung
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