This is quite sad really. Both the HTC devices I've owned (going way back for the 1st with a Windows Mobile 6 packing Mogul/Titan and more recently the OG Evo) have been fantastic pieces of hardware. Perhaps some continued firmware tweaks can bring the camera performance back around, but the SoC really seems to be dragging the model down. Maybe even a midcycle refresh, like and M8+ with a better suited SoC. I haven't looked into it in awhile, but at least a few months ago there were rumors floating around of a new model that massaged the power usage a bit, I think it was being referred to as an 815 but this is purely off memory.
Qualcomm is denying that there was ever such a thing as an 815 on their roadmap; and is putting the 820 on the roadmap for retail availability at the end of this/start of next year.
I really wonder how the rest of this years Snapdragon 810 devices will perform. The LG G4 is even rumored to be using the 808 instead, due to the issues with the G Flex 2.
It's all good, Qualcomm will provide free cases with 60mm USB powered fans for every phone with Snapdragon810. As an alternative they'll also sell phase-change cooling backpacks.
A large part is the Cortex a57 and a53 cores. By all the looks of it Qualcomm could, and should, have stuck with their increasingly aging Snapdragon cores, shrunk the process to TSMC or Samsung's 20nm, and gottent better perf/battery life out it.
While it is true that the S810 would have been better with Krait, you have to consider the fact that ARM had already optimized the A57 and A53 cores for 20 nm and Qualcomm would have had to spend additional resources to get Krait to work well on 20 nm which would:-
a) Ended up delaying Krait's ARMv8 successor. b) Not be as efficient because a lot of improvements in Krait 400/300 came from the fact that 28 nm was a mature process and Qualcomm was used to it.
You have to blame HTC to really. They should have compensated for S810 by including panel self refresh and a bigger battery but noooo, they want to make the phone as cheap as possible (display isn't well calibrated remember) and sell well for 700$. Sorry HTC, you aren't getting much money this year.
Nope they slap the same commodity SOC, screen, battery, and camera together just like everyone else these days. The $600+ phone gravy train is running off the tracks.
The Krait cores were only competitive against A15 cores due to their ability to run at higher frequency. The issue with that is that 20nm in TSM they only had LPE, which seems to be terrible at high frequency, so they needed to use cores with higher IPC or there would be a huge performance regression and a terrible comparison with A57 cores.
This will be a big problem going forward. Look at Mali T760MP6 on Exynos 5433. Going from 600 MHz to 700 MHz requires a tremendous amount of power. The GHz race could only work till 28 NM it seems. The only solution to improve performance/watt is to go wider.
I can't completely agree with your statement. The issue is that to go to 20nm they should have used FinFet to reduce the current leakage at high frequencies. They didn't (neither GF, Samsung or TSMC) and that has been the consequence: 20nm doesn't scale well at high frequencies. Intel has managed to clock cores till 3.5 GHz already in 14nm FinFet, so with FinFet there shouldn't have the same issue. By the way: I suspect NVidia had the same issue with the Denver cores and therefore they decided to go with A57 at 20nm. But I agree that in most of the cases they should go wider (or increase IPC in some other way) in mobile. Even the A57 has only 3 paths.
Sure, but apparently finfet is harder for everyone that's not Intel. But Samsung, GloFo, and TSMC all now have Finfet up and running. At 3 years behind Intel for a similar enough feature density, and considering how hard Intel found shrinking their feature size once again, one wonders how long it will take these other 3 to get to a new process node after this. > 2 years is my guess.
Alternate materials with less voltage leak and higher electron mobility are really, really needed and I don't understand why more isn't invested into them, other than uninformed executives making the decisions for future investment rather than engineers. 10nm (as in 2 actual feature size shrinks from 22/20nm) is doable with optical tools. But beyond that there are multiple new tools and techniques that need to fight vastly increasing complications and quality needed. The end of Moore's law is indeed within sight.
10nm is actually really hard. Either you do quad patterning (write 4 times slightly offset), which is less than trivial (you cannot make each step too wide and you will chip at it to prepare before the next) or you jump to extreme UV, and no one is there yet. Intel has been spending a lot of time and money in solving those problems for years and they are STILL not solved...
Nice find. I suspected that HTC just botched their settings based on the first release camera results and how they improved greatly on the second release. They need to keep working on it.
^^ This is what is it supposed to show even with all tweaks and manual settings and good lighting condition.
These above photos are littered with overexposed highlights, loss of detail, noise in sky and just wrong colour. They have a weird greenish tint.
Above all, when you want to take a quick photo, you can't do so many changes in settings and try to find the right combination. If I had time, I would take out my DSLR - why worry about a phone camera?
Agreed. I take close to 90% of my pictures these days with my phone. I've got expensive DSLRs and lenses. But for many purposes, the phone camera serves the purpose just as well. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true.
I had hopes HTC would finally have fixed their camera problems. Th design of this phone reflects the chaos in the company's upper management. They can't seem to make a camera to save their lives. Literally.
Just to update you: upon introducing the M9, HTC experienced a 33% month to month decline in revenues and a 39% year to year decline. That shouldn't happen when your latest and greatest hits the market. So yes, they're circling the drain.
I doubt it. I almost never use the camera in my phone, and when I do it is to take a quick snap of something funny or interesting I just saw. Any phone camera is good enough for that.
HTC has been unprofitable or marginally profitable for a very long time. And yes, that will be the death of the company. They needed to do it right and they didn't.
I don't really understand why HTC first had a good idea and tried with 4Mpix and then instead of going in the middle between resolution and quality went right away to this terrible 20Mpix sensor? It would have been interesting if they went to something around 8-13Mpix... which is just fine resolution-wise. So now they first failed with low 4Mpix and now again failed with the super high 20Mpix...
It really seem slike they just rushed as far as they could in the opposite direction when deciding the specs for this camera. Ultrapixels was a good idea and a middle ground would have been nice. Maybe something like the iPhone 6 but with OIS.
How large would the pixels be on a 8.3 MP(4K capable), 1/2.3 sensor be?
Yes, and they could,d have gotten an 8MP sensor off the shelf, or. 12-13MP version, or even a 16MP. They didn't need to go all the way to 20.
It almost seems as thought they didn't even look at the specs, just the pixel count. And then they got rid of the camera processor as well. Very bad move.
"And then they got rid of the camera processor as well. Very bad move."
Yeah, this is ridiculously stupid. I had a dumbphone in 2008 (the Motorola Zine) that had a separate imaging co-processor, and as a result it had autofocus times and shot-to-shot times on par with any 2015 smartphone. An imaging co-processor goes a LONG way.
HTC's are Android phones. Me, I'm happy the M9 is not vastly different from the HTC M8. The M8 is my first smartphone and I don't regret my decision. I wish the M8 battery life were longer, but I'm glad overall that I have no urgent need to ditch the M8 for the M9.
HTC Phones are also Windows phones. They have the flagship M8 in windows flavors, go look.
If the M8 is your first smartphone I can see why you love it, it does feel premium and it is a good phone. Better than this M9 is if you ask me. But I honestly still feel that the ONE M7 was by and far the best phone of their ONE Mx lineup.
I'll definately be keeping this phone for the time being, HTC has nothing worth upgrading to if you ask me right now.
I would have been happy with it being similar to the M8 if it didn't regress in so many categories. There must have been a new manager or director somewhere along the line as the M8 was right up there with all of the flagships.
And as Refuge pointed out the M8 was released for Windows. I wasn't ready to upgrade my Lumia 928 then but it sure is showing its age now. With no viable WP flagship coming up I think it's time to switch. Bah.
Wait for the upcoming Lumia flagship. It'll be the same wait until when HTC launches the M9 for Windows as well. I'm holding on to my 925 until the WP10 Lumia announcement myself :) Although an "Ativ" S6 would be quite the marvellous device.
I'm not holding my breath for it. It's been rumored for well over a year and there's still no release date. I'm making my decision around mid to late May and if it isn't out by then I'm doing Android.
At one point HTC was the company to beat when it came to Android Smartphones. It seems like all they do now is make inferior clones of the HTC One (M7 in HTC-speak). It seems like they're actively trying to fail, especially since they're a practical non-entity marketing wise and Apple and Samsung dump millions into marketing.
Half a second is the total time to take and save an image; not the shutter time. Most of it is pre-processing between when the button is pressed and the sensor exposed, post-processing after eposure to turn the raw image from the sensor into something to show on the screen and save as a jpeg, and the time spend to write to flash itself.
So the snapdragon 810 overheating and efficiency problems are more or less included in this phone ?
That's very bad.
I heard about adreno 420 throttling problems which limited it to "not so much faster than 801" and this 810 is just a bit faster than 805.... We had seen a big perf jump from M7 to M8 but where are those 80% improved performance that qualcom promised last year compared to adreno 330 ? And 20nm should have brought some rather significant efficiency gains... So what happened ? Apple is leaving only low quality wafers to their competition at TSMC or what ? Because A8 is maybe slower at imediate benchmarks but the combination of a suposedly far more efficient architecture than the competition ( little heat = little throtling) and relativelly low resolution displays makes iPhones fly. I even seen that galaxy S6 has problems sustaining their performance and even bigger than HTC thanks to it's QHD display.
Maybe the LG G4 can surprise us as snapdragon 808 could possibly sustan performance better....
These things are amazing, fantastic speakers, absolutely gorgeous screen, fast and clear camera, fastest phone I've been able to play with in awhile, and also the battery life? My old lady is glued to her phone for work constantly, and she can get 2 days out of it. If I were to use it I could get 3.
I would switch myself from my M7 to one, but I hate the sleep button on the back, and I hate how big it is! Those are really big screens, too much for me to be interested in it being in my pocket on the regular.
Once you start using double-tap-to-wake, and double-tap-status-bar-to-sleep (some launchers even let you set double-tap-on-home-to-sleep), you'll find yourself rarely using the power button for anything.
However, if you use your phone a lot for music, you'll really come to love having the power button and volume controls on the back of the phone. You don't have to put your hand in your pocket with the phone to manage the media. Just slide the phone into your pocket with the screen along your leg ... and the buttons are now accessible through the outside of the pocket! So much nicer that way. Especially with the headphone jack on the bottom, which makes the buttons align correctly when the phone is in your pocket (move your finger "up" or straighten it for volume up).
The other really nice thing about the G2 is that it has a 5.2" screen size ... but the overall phone size is smaller than most phones with only 5.0" screens. They're really done a great job keeping the overall phone sizes down since the Optimus G. I have no issues keeping my G2 in my front jeans pockets, front shorts pockets, or the inside pocket of my jackets.
Compared to the last 3 HTC and Sony phones, the LG G2 can be considered a compact phone.
I think a big part of the problem is that Apple surprised the industry with the A7 64 bit SoC. Everyone is trying to catch up. But it seems likely that no one was actively working on 64 bits except Apple. The new Tegra looks good, but has its own problems with thottling, etc.
Qualcomm was caught with its pants down. That's for sure. The 810 seems rushed, and is far from optimized. Perhaps later in the year, new tapeouts will fix some of the problems. Samsung's SoC is a bit better, but is still behind
Well final versions of products haven't been released for the X1. And take in mind that even though the K1 was released earlier than the Snapdragon 805, even the Snapdragon 810 doesn't come close to matching it. And the X1 is "twice" as fast potentially. Even if the final performance is reduced in mobile settings, it would still be far, far faster than anything else =). And the K1 has no issue with throttling. Nvidia wouldn't let default settings be too aggressive if it meant throttling. The Snapdragon 810 would probably perform more admirably in these new devices with the temperature throttling turned off or adjusted in terms of temperature or reduced clock speeds.
I would prefer a 32 bit A8X with my iPad Air 2 so I could have the increased RAM footprint of 64 bit apps back. Qualcomm was taken surprise by the public hype of 64 bit. Even the Nexus 9 suffers a bit with 64 bit and only 2 GB of RAM.
HTC has made trading my M8 in for a Samsung Galaxy S6 an easy choice. I was probably already going to do it for the VR, but it's clear that their's no benefit to sticking with HTC.
Amazes me that in this day and age a premium smartphone can still screw up the camera. How hard can it be? Forget gimmicks just get the basics right. With so many good off the shelf options...just bizarre.
But the camera is a gimmick. A phone is designed to make and receive calls. How odd nobody seems to want a phone to do the one thing it is primarily designed to do. When I read HTC was fiddling with the camera on the M9, I heaved a sigh of relief.
If you said that 5+ years ago I would have tended to agree but that's no longer the case. The camera for many has become more important than making calls.
I bet if you asked a survey of 1000 smartphone users what was the top three reasons for having a smartphone I'd be surprised if making calls scraped in at 3.
I use mine mostly for internet, email, and text. But thats just the nature of my business. Phone calls come through too, but only for things that can't be said one off in a text.
The name smartphone is increasing a mis-nomer. The phone capability is a gateway feature; but the more the average person uses one, the more it ceases to be a phone, and instead becomes a hand computer that includes voice calls in the me-too feature checklist section. If almost all you're doing are voice calls and texting; any entry level phone will work as well as anything else on the market. It's the hand computer uses that differentiate the higher end models from each other.
The camera is one of the most important features of a smartphone. Every smartphone can competently make and receive phone calls. Every $20 flip phone can do that!
S6 has faster CPU and GPU, and far better display.
ALso, does all android games run on 1440p on S6 ?! I mean just because the display is 1440p that does not means that the game will run on native resolution.
Most games will not have a problem with 1440P and most higher-end games have options to adjust the resolution. I don't know if any games would by default output in 1080P (although it may not make a difference in some games).
«There is also the issue of the “logo bar” bezel, but it’s physically impossible to get rid of this bezel due to engineering constraints.»
I'm sorry Joshua but these are just HTC's claims and I call bollocks on that. Check the M9's teardown at ifixit and you'll see the PCBs have lots of free space everywhere and is oddly shaped for no apparent reason at all. The difference for the iphones and Galaxy Ses is astounding, where everything is a lot more compact and neatly organized. Nor is there any valid reason not to at least even out the black bar between top and bottom, making a symmetrical phone.
At this point, the "HTC black bar" is just a result of lazy industrial design choice and/or incompetent PCB design, IMO.
I've discussed the issue with people outside of HTC, and independently verified HTC's claim by checking multiple device teardowns.
Fundamentally, the display driver is a large chip that must be coplanar with the display. It's possible to hide the appearance of this display driver, but there is a minimum level of bezel necessary to enable an active matrix display.
Looking at that pic, the Z3 totally has a bezel that's about the same size as HTC's. It just doesn't have a front firing speaker... Speaker height + Bezel Height = Complaints about HTC bezel size?
There seems to be a significant difference in size between the Z3 Speakers and the HTC ones. Having never heard a Z3, I'm assuming the HTC ones have more volume to them. I'm not saying it was the right call but squeezing a decent sized speaker in the front would necessitate a larger bezel above to fit the display circuitry. The Z3 speaker looks tiny and seems to take minimal space in comparison. Maybe that's just Sony throwing around it's hardware prowess but the extra bezel, although ugly, makes sense in the HTC case. It's not like they just stuck it there to display their logo.
No, the stereo speakers on this thing make good quality sound because they actually need the hollow space in there to reverberate the sound waves. Otherwise they would shove the screen drivers in there. It's a tradeoff. Deal with it.
I love the bezel on the bottom It gives me a place to put my thumb without triggering anything on the phone. Giving me a solid grip when passing it around or quickly picking it up on the way out the door.
My girlfriends G3 while really nice, frustrates me to no end because she has no hard capacitive buttons, and barely any bezel, I'm constantly poking things on the bottom of her screen when passing the phone around.
Am I the only one not concerned with increased performance? Phone these days are plenty powerful. Sell me on a jumbo battery, or health tracking features.
Yeah to be honest I'd be sold on a phone that's another 3-4 mm thicker, so we could have a two day+ battery life and a better lens/sensor system in the phone.
I might reccomend looking at the LG Vista, it is a mid range so very affordable.
The screen is gorgeous, and the batter life is extremely impressive. My son has one, and he plays games on it constantly, that battery holds up really well too!
Thanks for the review. It's a shame to see just how poor the One M9 is. Hopefully the S6 review comes out this week! Will y'all be reviewing the G4 when it comes out?
Weird, I thought the Sensation was better in a lot of respects vs. the GS2 phone. Screen comes to mind. Only issue with the Sensation was it was only on Tmobile, and the thunderbolt was a poor phone. Evo was OK I suppose.
Colors were more accurate, resolution a hair higher, contrast and blacklevels were seriously lagging compared to the S2, speed of the phone was quite a bit slower, camera was much worse too.
Joshua, your concerns regarding the snapdragon 810, do you think they are device specific or can we expect this to hold true across different flagship phones? I'm waiting for the Xperia Z4 but wondering if it's worth it compared to the 801 in the Z3
Ouch. That horrible SoC might have been OK to swallow, but the camera is definitely a deal breaker for many...
They could have stuck with the exact same design and internals of the M8 while dramatically improving the camera, and it would have been much more of an upgrade than ^this...
On a side note, HTC SERIOUSLY needs to reconsider the internal design and layout of components. Repairing the One, _any One_, is a nightmare.
So to wrap-up: HTC had quite a nice device to start with - the HTC One M8, but decided to ruin it all, starting with the camera subsystem which is a joke, followed by a I'm_A_Mistake_SoC - the 810. Samsung knew what they were doing when they chose their own Exynos to power the S6.
It's a pity because I really like HTC devices. Having put so much emphasis on the camera features I just can't believe what they did in this area with the M9. They wanted to "buy" us with the megapixel count or what?
I wonder if it's HTC chosen phone design architecture that's giving them troubles here, camera aside as who knows why that's been out of sorts.
HTC sandwiches the battery between the LCD and the PCB (containing SoC, modem etc). This design is fine if all of the components hit their power envelopes, but everything is working against HTC here. When the SoC or wireless modem gets hot, the battery acts like a heat sink plus however much heat is taken out by the back casing.
Then, a quick charge where you're putting 10+ Watts into charging the battery is going to heat up that battery a bit.
Just seems like two bad things that can make things worse really fast. I imaging playing a game or doing something processor intensive while quick charging would not be a good thing to do here.
I upgraded from an M7 to an M9. For me the camera is not so important because it all gets uploaded to social media. For me the killer features are the audio. I must have high audio quality from my phone. The M9 has amazing audio quality from all outputs (speaker or headphone). It's mind blowing how good it is. The Dolby mode has some serious mojo going on. It's comical how bad the Beats mode was compared to it. The Dolby mode is so good it works brilliantly on all types of music, which shouldn't be possible.
Yeah. I can excuse glossing over the external speakers for media, but not for speakerphone; that is a very, VERY important thing to consider. And to not test the headphone output is also very stupid.
So the m9 is WORSE than the m8? That's a shame, as I almost purchased an m8, and was hoping a future model could replace my iPhone, but if they are getting worse, than I'll stay away.
I have a feeling we're going to need to disable 4 cores, that'll make it run like the S801 and hopefully reign in on excessive heat. Maximum performance will suffer but battery life will hopefully return to M8 levels and or surpass it.
I don't understand this 8 core crap. Two or three years ago, it might have made sense to have four weak, but low power cores for much of the work, and four high end cores for the latest games, camera processing, etc.
But that never really worked out that well. When Samsung decided to use all eight at the same time, it was a really dumb idea. Not only are the two core types of differently strengths, but they also have slightly different instruction sets. And as we've already seen in at least one review, sometimes going to the weak cores uses more battery power than using the strong cores because of the time of processing, and other constraints of these cores.
And using all eight at the same time often results in slower processing because the two core sets can't process exactly the same way, and things get jammed up.
The problem here is that some manufacturers are just thinking of marketing. It's just SO much better to advertise 8 cores than 4. But Apple gets better performance out of three!
Something's got to give. They should just drop the weak cores altogether, and work on making the four strong cores better, and more efficient.
Just no. The current 7420 Exynos gets better performance than any A8 smartphone SoC (at the same resolution) all around. In practise (except gaming at native resolution) too, despite pushing many more pixels (up to a factor 3.7).
As for a comparison to the A8X, that's flawed in so many ways. Its TDP is up to twice as high and it's almost twice as large too. People are already complaining about the heat it produces in a large iPad, consider it sitting in a smartphone... The 7420 CPU outpaces it, despite the above differences, the GPU is 10-20% slower. But with much less power consumption and heat as a bonus. I guess those 8 cores aren't so bad afterall.
"The Android death knell sounds. " 1bn people who purchased one last year disagree.... But if Microsoft could actually get its act together, it could take serious market share. Apple will never take the share as it is simply too expensive for 95% of android users.
iOS is where it is now, which is the high end mobile platform where most developers, enterprise, games, apps, and paying users are.
High end Android was always a niche but it was a niche with the potential to overtake Apple. Unfortunately for the last two years it has been a niche in decline. I mostly blame Google and Samsung. This BS from HTC is icing on the cake.
I don't often post on Anandtech but when I do it is because I've almost been moved to tears. I bought the HTC One M7 because I knew HTC was in trouble and I wanted to my tiny little bit to support a small company who had made a genuinely great phone. I skipped the M8 because upgrading every generation is just a bit silly on the pocket and because it was not muc of an upgrade anyway. I was looking forward to the M9 but this is a disaster of a product. Not only is not not better than the M8, it is not better than the M7. I can only see 2 things happening. Either they put out a revised Phone/model half way through this current generations life-cycle that dramatically fixes the glaring issues and/or offers something that stands out in the market, or they go to the wall and pheonix explodes into ashes, this time for good. RIP HTC.
For the performance degradation chart, rather than having the average fps on the x axis, wouldn't it be better to have (% of initial fps during last test run) as it is an indication of the impact of thermal throttling and will be more comparable across devices.
Wowza! How unfortunate. I've been team HTC since the G2. But, I will not be upgrading from my M8 to the M9. That thing has a faulty processor, a mediocre camera experience, a display that is lacking in pretty much every area, and uncompetitive battery life. I'll check it out in my local tmobile store and if it's actually better than the review states (which I doubt, cuz this is anandtech not bgr), I'll purchase it. If the review is dead on (which I expect it to be), I'll be purchasing the 64gb black S6. I hate to say this, but the M9 might be the nail in the coffin for HTCs Mobile business.
I'm really starting to believe that ARM found a gold mine with big.LITTLE
I'm fairly sure they work hard to keep the performance to power consumption and heat generation ratio of A15/A57 cores well above anything sustainable on mobile designs based entirely on them
Therefore FORCING their partners to pay more per SoC since all SoCs now MUST use not 2 or 4 ARM cores but 6 and in most cases 8 cores after adding the necessary A7/A53 cores(and paying more for each extra one) to stay competitive.
I can hardly believe they keep thinking big.LITTLE is the best way to go considering how Apple's designs (and Qualcomms Krait as A15s competition) have proven to behave better while also keeping power consumption and heat generation in check.
Literally the ONLY big.LITTLE SoC that hasn't had inconsistent and unreliable performance is the Exynos 7420 and maybe, but to a much lesser extent the 5433.
I really hope to start seeing more custom cores soon.
Some information in your camera review part is wrong. For example:
1, for the same sensor size, the smaller the pixel size, the more Dynamic Range for the output image. Pixel level DR does not matter.
2, aperture ratio of "F/x" is a ratio. It is not an absolute number. As such when comparing lesnes of different sensor sizes, F ratio comparison is completely pointless. For light gathering purpose and subject isolation purpose, for the same FOV, it is the aperture width that actually matters. M9's aperture opening is 2.15mm, while M8's is 1.925. M9 clearly has larger aperture. thus your statement "The aperture has also regressed somewhat from f/2.0 to f/2.2" is completely erroneous.
There are other errors which I would rather not go into more detail.
Aperture ratio is not relative to sensor size. Aperture ratio is the ratio of focal length to aperture opening. For example, 24mm F/2 means focal length is 24mm, aperture opening is half that at 12mm.
M9's ratio is lower than M8 but its aperture is in fact larger.
I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that a user should go to the Play Store to find various applications that they like, as taking this to its logical conclusion basically ends with having to download a dialer application from the Play Store on first boot - I totally agree with you Joshua Ho, Ars Technica's Ron gave hardly any credit to the new M9. I know its hardware has been a let down but software is one place I and probably a lot of people will always give credit to HTC. Its incorrect to bash HTC's software just because it does not do gimmicks like spit the screen for multiple apps.
HTC is done. I was in Taiwan back in November and even at its home everyone know HTC is not going to be around much longer. People with money are buying iPhone at higher than US price. People without money are eying Xiaomi and other budget goodness. Only a group sandwiched in between will pay iPhone money for Xiaomi quality and even Xiaomi is delivering better quality than HTC.
I know almost nothing of photography, so please do not take this as a sarcastic question: what is wrong with the example photos in the article? They are described as being "horrible", among other things, and I am just not seeing it. They look more or less fine to me. I really want to know what is wrong since apparently I am really uninformed.
I'm really bummed by this... my wife and I are happy M7 owners from two years ago and we're about to be eligible for a cheap phone upgrade, and I was thinking of the M9. Guess I'll wait another year...
I don't think I could ever go to a phone with rear facing speakers, though. So there's that... don't think I could ever do a Samsung phone until they change that.
Does wifi speed correlate to wifi range? What is mean is, who cares about the wifi speed as long as it's not cringe worthy bad. If great wifi speed doesn't correlate with a good wifi range, I think people would much rather know how far away from a router the phone can be used, when using the same router.
Not a _single_ positive, just a bunch of some negative comments from a person who, for some reason, really disliked the device. Expecting he was advised in doing so.
I DO OWN an m9, and dare say this review is thorough crap. Each author's argument (e.g., performance, screen, camera, etc.) just doesn't stand my experience whatsoever. I have no time nor reason to dispute these, just wanted to say fuck for the well deserved site.
Saying that HTC needs a good camera to be relevant on the phone market is a bit of a bold statement. I don't think that the camera alone is the main reason for people to buy smartphones, people who are aficionados at taking pictures they will use a digital camera instead. As far as the camera is able to offer good/usable image quality, I think is enough.
It's another elite snob issue - they just MUST have the best possible artistry - otherwise their glorified selfie may be - king and queen forbid - plebian in nature...
It's just like the constant desire for thinner as if they are a heroin doused runway queen wannabe - couple with the "feel" it must have as they coddle it in their refined paws ...
Thus .... we will have a twisted groupthink stinky mind melded horror as the top tier, thanks to all the primping tards
don't you just love the angle iron heads - oh it must be metal or she feels so cheap in my hand - yet metal feels very uncomfortable in the hand compared to plastic
metal is a harsh object on the hands - then after begging for metal and glass and industrial design - and absolute thinness which means sharp corners not smooth bends - we get the sharp edge whine....
YES IT'S GOING TO CUT AND HURT AND EVEN PHYSICALLY DAMAGE YOUR HAND WHEN YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN APPLE CLONE METAL GLASS HORROR BECAUSE SOME GROUPIE TOLD YOU IT IS THE KING OF ELITISM AND YOUR MIND CANNOT GET PAST IT
Worst hardware company I had bought htc desire x and wifi/host-spot problem occurred within a year. I gave it to the service centre and they changed motherboard because in case of any hardware issue they have only one option which is replacement of motherboard. And when they changed motherboard of my phone then 3 and half months later camera stopped working first and then phone get dead within one month. So this is htc (Htc Third Class). And again they asked me to replacement of motherboard (what the f**k they people) and motherboard cost is near about Rs.7500/-. Even htc dosn't trust on their hardware more that 3 months cause whenever they change motherboard they only gives an extended warrenty of only 3 months. Shame on you guys(htc team).
There are lot of smartphone companies are there having more features as compare with htc in less price.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
127 Comments
Back to Article
nismotigerwvu - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
This is quite sad really. Both the HTC devices I've owned (going way back for the 1st with a Windows Mobile 6 packing Mogul/Titan and more recently the OG Evo) have been fantastic pieces of hardware. Perhaps some continued firmware tweaks can bring the camera performance back around, but the SoC really seems to be dragging the model down. Maybe even a midcycle refresh, like and M8+ with a better suited SoC. I haven't looked into it in awhile, but at least a few months ago there were rumors floating around of a new model that massaged the power usage a bit, I think it was being referred to as an 815 but this is purely off memory.DanNeely - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Qualcomm is denying that there was ever such a thing as an 815 on their roadmap; and is putting the 820 on the roadmap for retail availability at the end of this/start of next year.http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/37406-there-is...
Laxaa - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I really wonder how the rest of this years Snapdragon 810 devices will perform. The LG G4 is even rumored to be using the 808 instead, due to the issues with the G Flex 2.jjj - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
It's all good, Qualcomm will provide free cases with 60mm USB powered fans for every phone with Snapdragon810.As an alternative they'll also sell phase-change cooling backpacks.
Frenetic Pony - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
A large part is the Cortex a57 and a53 cores. By all the looks of it Qualcomm could, and should, have stuck with their increasingly aging Snapdragon cores, shrunk the process to TSMC or Samsung's 20nm, and gottent better perf/battery life out it.blanarahul - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
While it is true that the S810 would have been better with Krait, you have to consider the fact that ARM had already optimized the A57 and A53 cores for 20 nm and Qualcomm would have had to spend additional resources to get Krait to work well on 20 nm which would:-a) Ended up delaying Krait's ARMv8 successor.
b) Not be as efficient because a lot of improvements in Krait 400/300 came from the fact that 28 nm was a mature process and Qualcomm was used to it.
blanarahul - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
You have to blame HTC to really. They should have compensated for S810 by including panel self refresh and a bigger battery but noooo, they want to make the phone as cheap as possible (display isn't well calibrated remember) and sell well for 700$. Sorry HTC, you aren't getting much money this year.Gunbuster - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
but but but R&D costs money, blah blah blah...Nope they slap the same commodity SOC, screen, battery, and camera together just like everyone else these days. The $600+ phone gravy train is running off the tracks.
skavi - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
They did add a larger battery.TylerGrunter - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
The Krait cores were only competitive against A15 cores due to their ability to run at higher frequency. The issue with that is that 20nm in TSM they only had LPE, which seems to be terrible at high frequency, so they needed to use cores with higher IPC or there would be a huge performance regression and a terrible comparison with A57 cores.blanarahul - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
This will be a big problem going forward. Look at Mali T760MP6 on Exynos 5433. Going from 600 MHz to 700 MHz requires a tremendous amount of power. The GHz race could only work till 28 NM it seems. The only solution to improve performance/watt is to go wider.TylerGrunter - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I can't completely agree with your statement. The issue is that to go to 20nm they should have used FinFet to reduce the current leakage at high frequencies. They didn't (neither GF, Samsung or TSMC) and that has been the consequence: 20nm doesn't scale well at high frequencies.Intel has managed to clock cores till 3.5 GHz already in 14nm FinFet, so with FinFet there shouldn't have the same issue.
By the way: I suspect NVidia had the same issue with the Denver cores and therefore they decided to go with A57 at 20nm.
But I agree that in most of the cases they should go wider (or increase IPC in some other way) in mobile. Even the A57 has only 3 paths.
Frenetic Pony - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Sure, but apparently finfet is harder for everyone that's not Intel. But Samsung, GloFo, and TSMC all now have Finfet up and running. At 3 years behind Intel for a similar enough feature density, and considering how hard Intel found shrinking their feature size once again, one wonders how long it will take these other 3 to get to a new process node after this. > 2 years is my guess.Alternate materials with less voltage leak and higher electron mobility are really, really needed and I don't understand why more isn't invested into them, other than uninformed executives making the decisions for future investment rather than engineers. 10nm (as in 2 actual feature size shrinks from 22/20nm) is doable with optical tools. But beyond that there are multiple new tools and techniques that need to fight vastly increasing complications and quality needed. The end of Moore's law is indeed within sight.
frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
10nm is actually really hard.Either you do quad patterning (write 4 times slightly offset), which is less than trivial (you cannot make each step too wide and you will chip at it to prepare before the next) or you jump to extreme UV, and no one is there yet.
Intel has been spending a lot of time and money in solving those problems for years and they are STILL not solved...
KiretoX - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Page 2 table, M9 read camera... OV4688... not Toshiba?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Fixed the table, thank you.Darkito - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
RIP HTCnathanddrews - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Rip in peace, HTC.blanarahul - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Dafuq?!Armourcore9brker - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
You should try setting the camera the way that was done in this XDA thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=598...It seems like setting the ISO too high is causing a lot of the problems.
Despoiler - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Nice find. I suspected that HTC just botched their settings based on the first release camera results and how they improved greatly on the second release. They need to keep working on it.rd_nest - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Seriously how many 'usable' shots can you get at 1/2 sec shutter speed without OIS? Even with OIS, I doubt I can get many.http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=599...
^^ This is what is it supposed to show even with all tweaks and manual settings and good lighting condition.
These above photos are littered with overexposed highlights, loss of detail, noise in sky and just wrong colour. They have a weird greenish tint.
Above all, when you want to take a quick photo, you can't do so many changes in settings and try to find the right combination. If I had time, I would take out my DSLR - why worry about a phone camera?
melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Agreed. I take close to 90% of my pictures these days with my phone. I've got expensive DSLRs and lenses. But for many purposes, the phone camera serves the purpose just as well. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true.But the phone camera must be a really good one.
pjcamp - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I had hopes HTC would finally have fixed their camera problems. Th design of this phone reflects the chaos in the company's upper management. They can't seem to make a camera to save their lives. Literally.smorebuds - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Literally?pjcamp - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
Just to update you: upon introducing the M9, HTC experienced a 33% month to month decline in revenues and a 39% year to year decline. That shouldn't happen when your latest and greatest hits the market. So yes, they're circling the drain.Stuka87 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So you are saying they are all going to die because the camera is no good? That seems a bit harsh...pedromcm.pm - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
The camera (and other problems) will makes people not consider the M9. Why should they, on the first place? As such, HTC will be going down.LordConrad - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
I doubt it. I almost never use the camera in my phone, and when I do it is to take a quick snap of something funny or interesting I just saw. Any phone camera is good enough for that.pjcamp - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC has been unprofitable or marginally profitable for a very long time. And yes, that will be the death of the company. They needed to do it right and they didn't.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
He probably means the life of the company? If they keep releasing phones this bad, they WILL go out of business.KiretoX - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I don't really understand why HTC first had a good idea and tried with 4Mpix and then instead of going in the middle between resolution and quality went right away to this terrible 20Mpix sensor? It would have been interesting if they went to something around 8-13Mpix... which is just fine resolution-wise. So now they first failed with low 4Mpix and now again failed with the super high 20Mpix...Laxaa - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
It really seem slike they just rushed as far as they could in the opposite direction when deciding the specs for this camera. Ultrapixels was a good idea and a middle ground would have been nice. Maybe something like the iPhone 6 but with OIS.How large would the pixels be on a 8.3 MP(4K capable), 1/2.3 sensor be?
pjcamp - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC doesn't have the market share to request a custom sensor like Apple. They have to work with whatever standard parts are available off the shelf.melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Yes, and they could,d have gotten an 8MP sensor off the shelf, or. 12-13MP version, or even a 16MP. They didn't need to go all the way to 20.It almost seems as thought they didn't even look at the specs, just the pixel count. And then they got rid of the camera processor as well. Very bad move.
Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
"And then they got rid of the camera processor as well. Very bad move."Yeah, this is ridiculously stupid. I had a dumbphone in 2008 (the Motorola Zine) that had a separate imaging co-processor, and as a result it had autofocus times and shot-to-shot times on par with any 2015 smartphone. An imaging co-processor goes a LONG way.
LordConrad - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
I would have preferred an 8 Ultrapixel camera on the M9. More incoming light and plenty of pixels for a phone camera.sinPiEqualsZero - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I'm sad to see this. Did no one at HTC use the phone before releasing it? I was hoping the M9 would be my new Windows phone later in the year.May need to switch to Android if no good flagships come out...perhaps the G4.
Thanks for the thorough review, Josh.
J4ckb1ng - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC's are Android phones. Me, I'm happy the M9 is not vastly different from the HTC M8. The M8 is my first smartphone and I don't regret my decision. I wish the M8 battery life were longer, but I'm glad overall that I have no urgent need to ditch the M8 for the M9.Refuge - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC Phones are also Windows phones. They have the flagship M8 in windows flavors, go look.If the M8 is your first smartphone I can see why you love it, it does feel premium and it is a good phone. Better than this M9 is if you ask me. But I honestly still feel that the ONE M7 was by and far the best phone of their ONE Mx lineup.
I'll definately be keeping this phone for the time being, HTC has nothing worth upgrading to if you ask me right now.
sinPiEqualsZero - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I would have been happy with it being similar to the M8 if it didn't regress in so many categories. There must have been a new manager or director somewhere along the line as the M8 was right up there with all of the flagships.And as Refuge pointed out the M8 was released for Windows. I wasn't ready to upgrade my Lumia 928 then but it sure is showing its age now. With no viable WP flagship coming up I think it's time to switch. Bah.
kspirit - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Wait for the upcoming Lumia flagship. It'll be the same wait until when HTC launches the M9 for Windows as well. I'm holding on to my 925 until the WP10 Lumia announcement myself :) Although an "Ativ" S6 would be quite the marvellous device.sinPiEqualsZero - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I'm not holding my breath for it. It's been rumored for well over a year and there's still no release date. I'm making my decision around mid to late May and if it isn't out by then I'm doing Android.Flunk - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
At one point HTC was the company to beat when it came to Android Smartphones. It seems like all they do now is make inferior clones of the HTC One (M7 in HTC-speak). It seems like they're actively trying to fail, especially since they're a practical non-entity marketing wise and Apple and Samsung dump millions into marketing.pedromcm.pm - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Apple and Samsung will bury the M9 because their products are better, not because of marketing.hung2900 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
And shooting in 0.5 shutter? R u serious? These photos were shot by tripod.DanNeely - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Half a second is the total time to take and save an image; not the shutter time. Most of it is pre-processing between when the button is pressed and the sensor exposed, post-processing after eposure to turn the raw image from the sensor into something to show on the screen and save as a jpeg, and the time spend to write to flash itself.GC2:CS - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So the snapdragon 810 overheating and efficiency problems are more or less included in this phone ?That's very bad.
I heard about adreno 420 throttling problems which limited it to "not so much faster than 801" and this 810 is just a bit faster than 805.... We had seen a big perf jump from M7 to M8 but where are those 80% improved performance that qualcom promised last year compared to adreno 330 ?
And 20nm should have brought some rather significant efficiency gains... So what happened ? Apple is leaving only low quality wafers to their competition at TSMC or what ?
Because A8 is maybe slower at imediate benchmarks but the combination of a suposedly far more efficient architecture than the competition ( little heat = little throtling) and relativelly low resolution displays makes iPhones fly.
I even seen that galaxy S6 has problems sustaining their performance and even bigger than HTC thanks to it's QHD display.
Maybe the LG G4 can surprise us as snapdragon 808 could possibly sustan performance better....
Refuge - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
LG sure does know how to make a phone.My girlfriend has had both the G2 and G3 now.
These things are amazing, fantastic speakers, absolutely gorgeous screen, fast and clear camera, fastest phone I've been able to play with in awhile, and also the battery life? My old lady is glued to her phone for work constantly, and she can get 2 days out of it. If I were to use it I could get 3.
I would switch myself from my M7 to one, but I hate the sleep button on the back, and I hate how big it is! Those are really big screens, too much for me to be interested in it being in my pocket on the regular.
kspirit - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
+1 for the G2 and G3. Hopefully the G4 will slay just as hard.phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Once you start using double-tap-to-wake, and double-tap-status-bar-to-sleep (some launchers even let you set double-tap-on-home-to-sleep), you'll find yourself rarely using the power button for anything.However, if you use your phone a lot for music, you'll really come to love having the power button and volume controls on the back of the phone. You don't have to put your hand in your pocket with the phone to manage the media. Just slide the phone into your pocket with the screen along your leg ... and the buttons are now accessible through the outside of the pocket! So much nicer that way. Especially with the headphone jack on the bottom, which makes the buttons align correctly when the phone is in your pocket (move your finger "up" or straighten it for volume up).
The other really nice thing about the G2 is that it has a 5.2" screen size ... but the overall phone size is smaller than most phones with only 5.0" screens. They're really done a great job keeping the overall phone sizes down since the Optimus G. I have no issues keeping my G2 in my front jeans pockets, front shorts pockets, or the inside pocket of my jackets.
Compared to the last 3 HTC and Sony phones, the LG G2 can be considered a compact phone.
melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I think a big part of the problem is that Apple surprised the industry with the A7 64 bit SoC. Everyone is trying to catch up. But it seems likely that no one was actively working on 64 bits except Apple. The new Tegra looks good, but has its own problems with thottling, etc.Qualcomm was caught with its pants down. That's for sure. The 810 seems rushed, and is far from optimized. Perhaps later in the year, new tapeouts will fix some of the problems. Samsung's SoC is a bit better, but is still behind
aenews - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Well final versions of products haven't been released for the X1. And take in mind that even though the K1 was released earlier than the Snapdragon 805, even the Snapdragon 810 doesn't come close to matching it. And the X1 is "twice" as fast potentially. Even if the final performance is reduced in mobile settings, it would still be far, far faster than anything else =). And the K1 has no issue with throttling. Nvidia wouldn't let default settings be too aggressive if it meant throttling. The Snapdragon 810 would probably perform more admirably in these new devices with the temperature throttling turned off or adjusted in terms of temperature or reduced clock speeds.sonicmerlin - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
I would prefer a 32 bit A8X with my iPad Air 2 so I could have the increased RAM footprint of 64 bit apps back. Qualcomm was taken surprise by the public hype of 64 bit. Even the Nexus 9 suffers a bit with 64 bit and only 2 GB of RAM.JeffFlanagan - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC has made trading my M8 in for a Samsung Galaxy S6 an easy choice. I was probably already going to do it for the VR, but it's clear that their's no benefit to sticking with HTC.melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Well, the consensus right now is that the S6 is the best Android phone for sure, but that the Edge is gimmicky and overpriced.jabber - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Amazes me that in this day and age a premium smartphone can still screw up the camera. How hard can it be? Forget gimmicks just get the basics right. With so many good off the shelf options...just bizarre.J4ckb1ng - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
But the camera is a gimmick. A phone is designed to make and receive calls. How odd nobody seems to want a phone to do the one thing it is primarily designed to do. When I read HTC was fiddling with the camera on the M9, I heaved a sigh of relief.jabber - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
If you said that 5+ years ago I would have tended to agree but that's no longer the case. The camera for many has become more important than making calls.I bet if you asked a survey of 1000 smartphone users what was the top three reasons for having a smartphone I'd be surprised if making calls scraped in at 3.
Refuge - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I saw that you are on your first smartphone in another post of yours. So I understand if you haven't converted yet.But Smartphones aren't phones. I mean they are, but they aren't.
They are hubs to the world. This is a communication device, that is meant to be mobile and contain every form of communication we could ever crave.
Instagram, facebook, youtube, text messaging, instant messaging, skype, Uvuu, phone too.
I use mine mostly for internet, email, and text. But thats just the nature of my business. Phone calls come through too, but only for things that can't be said one off in a text.
jabber - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Yeah I rarely make calls on my phone. Why bother to spend 5 minutes chatting needlessly when maybe two short and quick text messages will do the same.Just have no use for small talk in day to day stuff. People only really call if they have to.
DanNeely - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
The name smartphone is increasing a mis-nomer. The phone capability is a gateway feature; but the more the average person uses one, the more it ceases to be a phone, and instead becomes a hand computer that includes voice calls in the me-too feature checklist section. If almost all you're doing are voice calls and texting; any entry level phone will work as well as anything else on the market. It's the hand computer uses that differentiate the higher end models from each other.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
"But the camera is a gimmick."The camera is one of the most important features of a smartphone. Every smartphone can competently make and receive phone calls. Every $20 flip phone can do that!
maroon1 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
S6 has faster CPU and GPU, and far better display.ALso, does all android games run on 1440p on S6 ?! I mean just because the display is 1440p that does not means that the game will run on native resolution.
aenews - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Most games will not have a problem with 1440P and most higher-end games have options to adjust the resolution. I don't know if any games would by default output in 1080P (although it may not make a difference in some games).ToTTenTranz - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
«There is also the issue of the “logo bar” bezel, but it’s physically impossible to get rid of this bezel due to engineering constraints.»I'm sorry Joshua but these are just HTC's claims and I call bollocks on that.
Check the M9's teardown at ifixit and you'll see the PCBs have lots of free space everywhere and is oddly shaped for no apparent reason at all. The difference for the iphones and Galaxy Ses is astounding, where everything is a lot more compact and neatly organized.
Nor is there any valid reason not to at least even out the black bar between top and bottom, making a symmetrical phone.
At this point, the "HTC black bar" is just a result of lazy industrial design choice and/or incompetent PCB design, IMO.
JoshHo - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I've discussed the issue with people outside of HTC, and independently verified HTC's claim by checking multiple device teardowns.Fundamentally, the display driver is a large chip that must be coplanar with the display. It's possible to hide the appearance of this display driver, but there is a minimum level of bezel necessary to enable an active matrix display.
Raniz - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Yet, somehow, Sony's bezel is significantly smaller.http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/138100...
Connoisseur - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Looking at that pic, the Z3 totally has a bezel that's about the same size as HTC's. It just doesn't have a front firing speaker... Speaker height + Bezel Height = Complaints about HTC bezel size?TrojMacReady - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
The Z3 has 2 front firing speakers, just like the HTC. They are even visible in the picture posted...Connoisseur - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
There seems to be a significant difference in size between the Z3 Speakers and the HTC ones. Having never heard a Z3, I'm assuming the HTC ones have more volume to them. I'm not saying it was the right call but squeezing a decent sized speaker in the front would necessitate a larger bezel above to fit the display circuitry. The Z3 speaker looks tiny and seems to take minimal space in comparison. Maybe that's just Sony throwing around it's hardware prowess but the extra bezel, although ugly, makes sense in the HTC case. It's not like they just stuck it there to display their logo.Laxaa - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
The black bar is fine, but my biggest issue is the logo on the front. It just looks out of place.kspirit - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
No, the stereo speakers on this thing make good quality sound because they actually need the hollow space in there to reverberate the sound waves. Otherwise they would shove the screen drivers in there. It's a tradeoff. Deal with it.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Even if the black bar can't be eliminated, it couldn't be that difficult to just make it capacitive buttons instead of a stupid HTC logo.Refuge - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I love the bezel on the bottom It gives me a place to put my thumb without triggering anything on the phone. Giving me a solid grip when passing it around or quickly picking it up on the way out the door.My girlfriends G3 while really nice, frustrates me to no end because she has no hard capacitive buttons, and barely any bezel, I'm constantly poking things on the bottom of her screen when passing the phone around.
MikeMurphy - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Am I the only one not concerned with increased performance? Phone these days are plenty powerful. Sell me on a jumbo battery, or health tracking features.jabber - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Yeah to be honest I'd be sold on a phone that's another 3-4 mm thicker, so we could have a two day+ battery life and a better lens/sensor system in the phone.I really don't have an issue with a 200g phone.
Refuge - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I might reccomend looking at the LG Vista, it is a mid range so very affordable.The screen is gorgeous, and the batter life is extremely impressive. My son has one, and he plays games on it constantly, that battery holds up really well too!
Drumsticks - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review. It's a shame to see just how poor the One M9 is. Hopefully the S6 review comes out this week! Will y'all be reviewing the G4 when it comes out?sprockkets - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Weird, I thought the Sensation was better in a lot of respects vs. the GS2 phone. Screen comes to mind. Only issue with the Sensation was it was only on Tmobile, and the thunderbolt was a poor phone. Evo was OK I suppose.That comparison was 4 years ago, minor nit there.
TrojMacReady - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Colors were more accurate, resolution a hair higher, contrast and blacklevels were seriously lagging compared to the S2, speed of the phone was quite a bit slower, camera was much worse too.CrazyElf - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review.It's a disappointing phone. I wonder what they were thinking about when they made this? Hmm, probably not much on how it would be received.
zodiacfml - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Heartbreaking even without the S6. The S6 is just too good right now.mhaager2 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Joshua, your concerns regarding the snapdragon 810, do you think they are device specific or can we expect this to hold true across different flagship phones? I'm waiting for the Xperia Z4 but wondering if it's worth it compared to the 801 in the Z3kspirit - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I hope the Z4 and G4 both use the S808 or even 805 instead of this (literally) hot mess.lilmoe - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Ouch. That horrible SoC might have been OK to swallow, but the camera is definitely a deal breaker for many...They could have stuck with the exact same design and internals of the M8 while dramatically improving the camera, and it would have been much more of an upgrade than ^this...
On a side note, HTC SERIOUSLY needs to reconsider the internal design and layout of components. Repairing the One, _any One_, is a nightmare.
Gunbuster - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Repair has been a nightmare since always for HTC, Touch Pro's and Radar come to mind.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I was going to replace my Radar's battery before I decided to just buy a new phone, and it didn't look too awful...Gunbuster - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Battery is okay, anything involving the screen stack that is glued to the digitizer...Also super easy to wreck the microphone mylar flex cable.
tom5 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So to wrap-up: HTC had quite a nice device to start with - the HTC One M8, but decided to ruin it all, starting with the camera subsystem which is a joke, followed by a I'm_A_Mistake_SoC - the 810. Samsung knew what they were doing when they chose their own Exynos to power the S6.It's a pity because I really like HTC devices. Having put so much emphasis on the camera features I just can't believe what they did in this area with the M9. They wanted to "buy" us with the megapixel count or what?
Aenean144 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I wonder if it's HTC chosen phone design architecture that's giving them troubles here, camera aside as who knows why that's been out of sorts.HTC sandwiches the battery between the LCD and the PCB (containing SoC, modem etc). This design is fine if all of the components hit their power envelopes, but everything is working against HTC here. When the SoC or wireless modem gets hot, the battery acts like a heat sink plus however much heat is taken out by the back casing.
Then, a quick charge where you're putting 10+ Watts into charging the battery is going to heat up that battery a bit.
Just seems like two bad things that can make things worse really fast. I imaging playing a game or doing something processor intensive while quick charging would not be a good thing to do here.
Despoiler - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I upgraded from an M7 to an M9. For me the camera is not so important because it all gets uploaded to social media. For me the killer features are the audio. I must have high audio quality from my phone. The M9 has amazing audio quality from all outputs (speaker or headphone). It's mind blowing how good it is. The Dolby mode has some serious mojo going on. It's comical how bad the Beats mode was compared to it. The Dolby mode is so good it works brilliantly on all types of music, which shouldn't be possible.Despoiler - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Also, where is the audio section of the review? Seriously how do you omit one of the biggest selling points of this phone?Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Yeah. I can excuse glossing over the external speakers for media, but not for speakerphone; that is a very, VERY important thing to consider. And to not test the headphone output is also very stupid.Digekari - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
What about the internal audio? I was really interested in that.TallestJon96 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So the m9 is WORSE than the m8? That's a shame, as I almost purchased an m8, and was hoping a future model could replace my iPhone, but if they are getting worse, than I'll stay away.cryosx - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I have a feeling we're going to need to disable 4 cores, that'll make it run like the S801 and hopefully reign in on excessive heat. Maximum performance will suffer but battery life will hopefully return to M8 levels and or surpass it.melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I don't understand this 8 core crap. Two or three years ago, it might have made sense to have four weak, but low power cores for much of the work, and four high end cores for the latest games, camera processing, etc.But that never really worked out that well. When Samsung decided to use all eight at the same time, it was a really dumb idea. Not only are the two core types of differently strengths, but they also have slightly different instruction sets. And as we've already seen in at least one review, sometimes going to the weak cores uses more battery power than using the strong cores because of the time of processing, and other constraints of these cores.
And using all eight at the same time often results in slower processing because the two core sets can't process exactly the same way, and things get jammed up.
The problem here is that some manufacturers are just thinking of marketing. It's just SO much better to advertise 8 cores than 4. But Apple gets better performance out of three!
Something's got to give. They should just drop the weak cores altogether, and work on making the four strong cores better, and more efficient.
TrojMacReady - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
Just no.The current 7420 Exynos gets better performance than any A8 smartphone SoC (at the same resolution) all around. In practise (except gaming at native resolution) too, despite pushing many more pixels (up to a factor 3.7).
As for a comparison to the A8X, that's flawed in so many ways. Its TDP is up to twice as high and it's almost twice as large too. People are already complaining about the heat it produces in a large iPad, consider it sitting in a smartphone... The 7420 CPU outpaces it, despite the above differences, the GPU is 10-20% slower. But with much less power consumption and heat as a bonus. I guess those 8 cores aren't so bad afterall.
mrochester - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
The Android death knell sounds. This is what happens when you use the same software and ecosystem as your competitors.Speedfriend - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
"The Android death knell sounds. "1bn people who purchased one last year disagree....
But if Microsoft could actually get its act together, it could take serious market share. Apple will never take the share as it is simply too expensive for 95% of android users.
mrochester - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I meant that Android leads to the eventual decline to bottom feeder status/death due to the platform being the same across all devices.jabber - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
So in that case Apple iPhone should be..what/where exactly?KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
iOS is where it is now, which is the high end mobile platform where most developers, enterprise, games, apps, and paying users are.High end Android was always a niche but it was a niche with the potential to overtake Apple. Unfortunately for the last two years it has been a niche in decline. I mostly blame Google and Samsung. This BS from HTC is icing on the cake.
Quidam67 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I don't often post on Anandtech but when I do it is because I've almost been moved to tears. I bought the HTC One M7 because I knew HTC was in trouble and I wanted to my tiny little bit to support a small company who had made a genuinely great phone. I skipped the M8 because upgrading every generation is just a bit silly on the pocket and because it was not muc of an upgrade anyway. I was looking forward to the M9 but this is a disaster of a product. Not only is not not better than the M8, it is not better than the M7. I can only see 2 things happening. Either they put out a revised Phone/model half way through this current generations life-cycle that dramatically fixes the glaring issues and/or offers something that stands out in the market, or they go to the wall and pheonix explodes into ashes, this time for good. RIP HTC.HangFire - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I couldn't have said it better myself.skells - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
For the performance degradation chart, rather than having the average fps on the x axis, wouldn't it be better to have (% of initial fps during last test run) as it is an indication of the impact of thermal throttling and will be more comparable across devices.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Seconded. That'd make much more sense.@siraltonstyles - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Wowza! How unfortunate. I've been team HTC since the G2. But, I will not be upgrading from my M8 to the M9. That thing has a faulty processor, a mediocre camera experience, a display that is lacking in pretty much every area, and uncompetitive battery life. I'll check it out in my local tmobile store and if it's actually better than the review states (which I doubt, cuz this is anandtech not bgr), I'll purchase it. If the review is dead on (which I expect it to be), I'll be purchasing the 64gb black S6. I hate to say this, but the M9 might be the nail in the coffin for HTCs Mobile business.Fidelator - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I'm really starting to believe that ARM found a gold mine with big.LITTLEI'm fairly sure they work hard to keep the performance to power consumption and heat generation ratio of A15/A57 cores well above anything sustainable on mobile designs based entirely on them
Therefore FORCING their partners to pay more per SoC since all SoCs now MUST use not 2 or 4 ARM cores but 6 and in most cases 8 cores after adding the necessary A7/A53 cores(and paying more for each extra one) to stay competitive.
I can hardly believe they keep thinking big.LITTLE is the best way to go considering how Apple's designs (and Qualcomms Krait as A15s competition) have proven to behave better while also keeping power consumption and heat generation in check.
Literally the ONLY big.LITTLE SoC that hasn't had inconsistent and unreliable performance is the Exynos 7420 and maybe, but to a much lesser extent the 5433.
I really hope to start seeing more custom cores soon.
Ultimitsu - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Some information in your camera review part is wrong. For example:1, for the same sensor size, the smaller the pixel size, the more Dynamic Range for the output image. Pixel level DR does not matter.
2, aperture ratio of "F/x" is a ratio. It is not an absolute number. As such when comparing lesnes of different sensor sizes, F ratio comparison is completely pointless. For light gathering purpose and subject isolation purpose, for the same FOV, it is the aperture width that actually matters. M9's aperture opening is 2.15mm, while M8's is 1.925. M9 clearly has larger aperture. thus your statement "The aperture has also regressed somewhat from f/2.0 to f/2.2" is completely erroneous.
There are other errors which I would rather not go into more detail.
Laxaa - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
But isn't aperture relative to the sensor size?Ultimitsu - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Aperture ratio is not relative to sensor size. Aperture ratio is the ratio of focal length to aperture opening. For example, 24mm F/2 means focal length is 24mm, aperture opening is half that at 12mm.M9's ratio is lower than M8 but its aperture is in fact larger.
TT Masterzz - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that a user should go to the Play Store to find various applications that they like, as taking this to its logical conclusion basically ends with having to download a dialer application from the Play Store on first boot - I totally agree with you Joshua Ho, Ars Technica's Ron gave hardly any credit to the new M9. I know its hardware has been a let down but software is one place I and probably a lot of people will always give credit to HTC. Its incorrect to bash HTC's software just because it does not do gimmicks like spit the screen for multiple apps.Badelhas - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Why couldnt HTC just create a 8 Ultrapixel camera? I love the camera of my M8, the only thing lacking is resolution...Losaa - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Very sad for HTC. I love my m8, the m9 is an insult to customers which were happy to stay on the HTC ship for a long time.Peichen - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
HTC is done. I was in Taiwan back in November and even at its home everyone know HTC is not going to be around much longer. People with money are buying iPhone at higher than US price. People without money are eying Xiaomi and other budget goodness. Only a group sandwiched in between will pay iPhone money for Xiaomi quality and even Xiaomi is delivering better quality than HTC.ksdphys - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
I know almost nothing of photography, so please do not take this as a sarcastic question: what is wrong with the example photos in the article? They are described as being "horrible", among other things, and I am just not seeing it. They look more or less fine to me. I really want to know what is wrong since apparently I am really uninformed.tackle70 - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
I'm really bummed by this... my wife and I are happy M7 owners from two years ago and we're about to be eligible for a cheap phone upgrade, and I was thinking of the M9. Guess I'll wait another year...I don't think I could ever go to a phone with rear facing speakers, though. So there's that... don't think I could ever do a Samsung phone until they change that.
Martin84a - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
Does wifi speed correlate to wifi range? What is mean is, who cares about the wifi speed as long as it's not cringe worthy bad. If great wifi speed doesn't correlate with a good wifi range, I think people would much rather know how far away from a router the phone can be used, when using the same router.avs234 - Sunday, April 12, 2015 - link
An inadequate review.Not a _single_ positive, just a bunch of some negative comments from a person who, for some reason, really disliked the device. Expecting he was advised in doing so.
I DO OWN an m9, and dare say this review is thorough crap. Each author's argument (e.g., performance, screen, camera, etc.) just doesn't stand my experience whatsoever. I have no time nor reason to dispute these, just wanted to say fuck for the well deserved site.
vampyren - Monday, April 13, 2015 - link
Strange that the most important competitor (S6) is not in the list. Most people are deciding between these 2 phones so leaving it out is sloppy.evolucion8 - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
Saying that HTC needs a good camera to be relevant on the phone market is a bit of a bold statement. I don't think that the camera alone is the main reason for people to buy smartphones, people who are aficionados at taking pictures they will use a digital camera instead. As far as the camera is able to offer good/usable image quality, I think is enough.FlushedBubblyJock - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
It's another elite snob issue - they just MUST have the best possible artistry - otherwise their glorified selfie may be - king and queen forbid - plebian in nature...It's just like the constant desire for thinner as if they are a heroin doused runway queen wannabe - couple with the "feel" it must have as they coddle it in their refined paws ...
Thus .... we will have a twisted groupthink stinky mind melded horror as the top tier, thanks to all the primping tards
HangFire - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
HTC has traditionally done well with battery life? Huh? Someone has already forgotten the existence of the HTC Thunderbolt.Such a disappointment. The M9 won't be replacing my M7. My search continues.
FlushedBubblyJock - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
don't you just love the angle iron heads - oh it must be metal or she feels so cheap in my hand -yet metal feels very uncomfortable in the hand compared to plastic
metal is a harsh object on the hands - then after begging for metal and glass and industrial design - and absolute thinness which means sharp corners not smooth bends - we get the sharp edge whine....
YES IT'S GOING TO CUT AND HURT AND EVEN PHYSICALLY DAMAGE YOUR HAND WHEN YOU HAVE TO HAVE AN APPLE CLONE METAL GLASS HORROR BECAUSE SOME GROUPIE TOLD YOU IT IS THE KING OF ELITISM AND YOUR MIND CANNOT GET PAST IT
adsingh - Sunday, June 21, 2015 - link
Worst hardware companyI had bought htc desire x and wifi/host-spot problem occurred within a year. I gave it to the service centre and they changed motherboard because in case of any hardware issue they have only one option which is replacement of motherboard. And when they changed motherboard of my phone then 3 and half months later camera stopped working first and then phone get dead within one month. So this is htc (Htc Third Class). And again they asked me to replacement of motherboard (what the f**k they people) and motherboard cost is near about Rs.7500/-. Even htc dosn't trust on their hardware more that 3 months cause whenever they change motherboard they only gives an extended warrenty of only 3 months. Shame on you guys(htc team).
There are lot of smartphone companies are there having more features as compare with htc in less price.