The HTC 10 Review
by Joshua Ho on September 19, 2016 8:00 AM ESTLatency with Google WALT
One of the major points of differentiation with the HTC 10 is supposed to be smoothness. This, more than anything was something that HTC emphasized repeatedly in their initial introduction of the HTC 10. This phone is supposed to be smooth in a way that most of the Android competition isn’t. It’s really kind of disappointing to me that there isn’t a lot of information in the public domain testing HTC’s claims.
So in the interest of testing this out, I managed to get a WALT device working. What's WALT, you may ask? It's an internally developed Google toolset and hardware device combination to measure touch latency on Android (and Chromebook) products. By combining some simple external sensors connected to a Teensy board with the appropriate software to measure those sensors, WALT makes it possible to directly measure several forms of touch and audio latency of an Android device. Normally this would require a high-speed camera, but Google has developed WALT as a more practical alternative, internally validatating the product against said high speed footage.
To start we can look at tap latency and screen response time. Combining these two figures together will give us the total time it takes at minimum for the device to respond to a tap. It’s worth noting here that there is an upper bound to screen response time because devices are generally locked to 60 Hz and triple buffering means that our response time at best can be 48 ms. The screen response time figure is dominated by this latency in almost all cases, with some extra overhead for the panel’s native response time and some OS overhead can be involved as well.
In tap latency the HTC 10 performs fairly well but everything is so close here that I'm not sure it really matters. In the interest of trying to see what exactly HTC was trying to highlight I also went ahead and used the drag latency test to try and see if this was a notable point of differentiation.
While I would say that WALT's drag latency test seems to be highly unreliable and I'm kind of questionable on whether these results can really be trusted, there's definitely a noticeable difference in how quickly the HTC 10 responds to a swipe compared to most of the competition. The Galaxy S7 seems to keep up which is kind of surprising. I suspect that most of the difference in response between the two devices is the momentum given to a swipe rather than the actual latency.
Misc
With every review there are a lot of little things here and there that I end up discovering along the way that are interesting and worth discussing, but often cannot be discussed in a section of its own, but there are definitely things that have managed to grow past this section into their own as noteworthy.
One of the first places to start is the GNSS of this phone. I’m not sure what exactly HTC did here, but it’s remarkably fast and high quality. When connected to a network A-GPS through the cellular modem (Qualcomm gpsOne) allows for near-instant locks, but I managed to achieve a true cold lock in 1 minute and 6 seconds and it reached a precision of 13 feet within 10 seconds after initial position fix. Precision seems to be as high as 10 feet, which is pretty much the lower bound of what GPS can do without differential GPS systems which allow for precision down to about 10 centimeters.
In addition to GPS reception for whatever reason the HTC 10 seems to have noticeably good reception on AT&T LTE in the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles. It was not unusual for me to see the One M7 sitting on HSPA+ while the HTC 10 would still be on LTE. Of course, I don’t have any formal testing to back this claim up but generally speaking I saw anywhere from 3 to 6 dBm of difference in received power in favor of the HTC 10.
As far as design wins go, ST-M takes the design win for the laser auto-focus sensor, Synaptics is used for the touchscreen, Cypress CapSense Cy8C PSoC is used for the capacitive buttons, an NXP TFA9888 amp is used for the speakers, NXP PN544 is used for NFC, and an Analogix chip is used to enable the USB-C port. It’s identified only by the codename Ohio, but it’s fairly likely that this is the ANX7418. There’s also an ANX7816 for 4K30 over SlimPort. Looking at the SPI bus, for some reason there’s a Micrel KS8851 Ethernet MAC controller and HTC’s custom MCU which is referred to as CwMcuSensor. There’s also an Fingerprints FPC1155 for the fingerprint scanner, and an AK8789 hall sensor.
HTC claims that audio is over a separate DAC and amp, but I really can’t find any evidence that the HTC 10 has a DAC outside of the Snapdragon 820 in the system files, namely the WCD9335. Regardless, the speakers on the HTC 10 are a lot better than most other Android phones on the market. They’re still a step down from the One M9 or M8, but they do provide a fairly convincing stereo effect if you turn it on and overall quality is acceptable. I’m not exactly an audiophile but music over the 3.5mm jack didn’t have any noticeable issues like hissing or popping or anything strange like that.
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MobiusPizza - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Gosh that sentence is quite a mouthful
asfletch - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Agreed. Also re the content - is it surprising to anyone else that UFS solutions don't have a clearer advantage over eMMC? I mean my 2014 Note 4 gets about 19/7 on Random Read/Write with the same Androbench settings. According to these charts, that's better than the current Note 7. Also the HTC 10 here on test beats all of the UFS phones handily for Sequential Write speed.What's up with that? Is it the benchmark?
Guitahero - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
What happened with the deep audio analysis from anandtech?JKJK - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Indeed! I miss them too!winjay - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
"for its size I don’t believe there’s another Snapdragon 820 device with better battery life."Sony usually does wonders with battery life. Have you checked Xperia XA battery life?
Vagabondjonez - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
with a 2k display he probably meantwinjay - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Also this phone is said to have an amazing DAC. How is the audio output?Ro_Ja - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
The front looks like a Samsung Galaxy.amosbatto - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
This review (and every other review I have ever read) doesn't cover the most important issue, which is the longevity of the phone. Here are the issues which I suggest that a review should cover:1. We all know that the battery will die after 2 years. Every phone which has a replaceable battery should automatically get a higher rating, just because it will probably last longer than one which doesn't. If a phone has a sealed case, the reviewer should try to open the case and give readers an idea how hard it will be to replace the battery. If the case is glued together, if the battery is glued to the case or if it is impossible to buy replacement batteries on the internet, then the review should let us know.
2. Reviews should emphasize the amount of storage space a phone has and how expandable the phone is, because this has a big impact on how long the phone will last. If a phone is limited to 32 gigabytes of storage, then the phone will probably not last more than 2 years, because people tend to buy new phones once they run out of space. Trying to decide what apps to uninstall, what music to remove, what photos to delete, etc. is such a painful process, that many people simply buy a new phone. Reviews should really knock phones which don't have a MicroSD slot to expand storage and I would love to see some benchmarking on the difference in speed between the internal NAND and a normal MicroSD.
Frankly, I wish that smartphone manufacturers would offer us phones with two MicroSD slots, where one is used to expand the storage for apps on the phone and the second is the memory that we can remove to transfer files to our PC.
Another thing that reviews should cover is how hard is it insert and extract a MicroSD card. On my HTC Sensation from 2011, it was very easy to pop the MicroSD card in and out of the computer, but it can't be done without a special tool on my Moto X Pure Edition. Not a single review ever covers how hard it is to insert and extract the MicroSD card, but this is essential information for people like me who intend to keep their phones for many years.
3. Every review should mention how good the manufacturer is about offering security updates and OS upgrades to its phones, which are essential for extending the life of the phone. HTC has an excellent track record of offering fast updates when a new version of Android is released, whereas Samsung does not. Every review comparing an HTC phone to a Samsung phone should mention this difference, because it will influence the buying decisions of people who care about the longevity of their phones.
4. Another way to extend the life of a phone is to install an OS that doesn't come from the manufacturer. If the manufacturer stops offering upgrades, then we have the freedom to install CyanogenMod or another mod to get the new features in the latest version of Android. No review ever covers how hard it is to unlock the bootloader and install a mod in the phone, but this is essential information for a phone buyer who wants to be able to keep upgrading the phone. Does the manufacturer offer for free the code to unlock the bootloader and does it have a policy of voiding the warranty if a mod is installed? Five years ago when I bought my Sensation, HTC had the best mod policies in the industry, but I have no idea who is best today and this review didn't mention it.
Another piece of essential information is how standard the hardware is and how likely mods will be developed for the phone. For example, the SoC on the HTC 10 is a standard Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, so it is highly likely that mods will be made for this phone, whereas it is highly unlikely that mods will ever be created for a custom SoC made by Huawei, Samsung or Apple. Yes, that custom SoC probably processes a couple milliseconds faster, but frankly most people will never notice the difference.
5. Another way to extend the life of a phone is to turn it into a PC. I frankly don't see the point of buying a flagship phone like the HTC 10 which costs $600, but I might consider it if I know that it can be used as a low cost PC. Kudos to this review for at least mentioning that the HTC 10 supports Slimline and Android 7, but it doesn't explain why that is important. The phone has the necessary hardware and software to be hooked up to a monitor and bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so it can be used as a PC with multiple windows and a mouse pointer. I would have loved to read a review about how well this works with the HTC 10.
Reviewers spend an inordinate amount of time covering differences in processing speed and other minutiae which most people will never notice when using a phone, but they don't provide the most essential information to help people choose phones with long lifespans. Part of the reason is that reviewers are the type of people who get a new phone every year, so they don't worry about the battery wearing out. However, I think a more important factor is that fact that sites like AnandTech rely on advertising from the same manufacturers who they are reviewing. Manufacturers of smartphones and other electronic devices promote planned obsolescence as a way to increase their sales. A reviewer who dwells too much on the fact that a phone is designed to be thrown away after two years probably won't get much advertising and is unlikely to get free samples to review.
Apple has always had some of the worst policies in the industry in terms of planned obsolescence, but within the last 5 years the entire phone industry has started to copy Apple in designing sealed black boxes which are difficult to open and even harder to fix. Yet, I have not seen a single review of the iPhone 7 or any of the other recent smartphones which even mentions how hard it is to fix the phone or even replace the battery. If the reviewers don't mention it, then consumers won't think to check and the phone industry will conclude that consumers don't want fixable and modifiable phones, so they will offer more and more Apple-like devices.
Extending the life of smartphones is not just a way to save consumers money. One of the biggest ecological problems on the planet is the fact that 1.5 billion smartphones will be manufactured this year and most of them will be junked within 2 years. More smartphones are manufactured today than all the other ICT devices combined (servers, routers, desktop and notebook PCs, tablets, gaming consoles, cameras, televisions and advanced wearables). The amount of energy, metals and other vital resources which are wasted every year in making throwaway devices is astounding. If we estimate that the average smartphone and its charger weighs 150 grams, that means we are generating 225,000 metric tons of eventual e-waste every year, which is toxic and needs special treatment.
Even more alarming is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being generated to manufacture all these smartphones. Apple estimates that 83.6 kg of CO2-equivalent were emitted to manufacture and transport its iPhone 6 to point of sale, whereas using an iPhone for a year emits 3.5 kg CO2-e and recycling it at the end of its life emits 1.0 kg CO2-e. Of course, Apple didn't include all the energy to operate the cell towers, internet servers and routers, etc. that are used by an iPhone, but manufacturing a smartphone clearly has far more environmental impact than using it, so the best way to lower the environmental impact is to make the phone last as long as possible in order to avoid manufacturing a new phone.
Apple does not explain how it calculates its emissions, but it is highly likely that Apple did not include the SF6 which was emitted in manufacturing its screens or all the other types of greenhouse gases which often get overlooked. It also probably doesn't include in its emissions all the advanced processing to make the ultrapure chemicals, water and gases which are used in silicon and flat screen fabs. Today's crop of smartphones probably have an even higher environmental impact, considering that they are using larger screens, more memory and more processing cores than the iPhone 6, which had a 4.7in screen, 1 GB of RAM and 2 processing cores. Now-a-days, 5-6in screens, 2-4GB of RAM and 4-8 processing cores are the norm, so we can conservatively estimate that manufacturing today's smartphone will emit 100 kg CO2-e. For the 1.5 billion smartphones produced in 2016, that means 150,000 metric tons of CO2-e.
Allan_Hundeboll - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
You def. have a point