The HTC One M9 Review: Part 1
by Joshua Ho on March 22, 2015 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- Snapdragon 810
- One M9
GPU Performance
Although CPU is often the focus of any given SoC, it’s important to avoid using a weak GPU as even cases as simple as web browsing or navigating through a UI can rely on the GPU for rendering, in addition to the common use cases of gaming. It’s also possible that GPUs can be leveraged for compute, which has great use for cases like image and video processing. To this end, the Snapdragon 810 has an Adreno 430 GPU that runs at 600 MHz, similar to the Snapdragon 805’s Adreno 420. As a result, all of the improvements we’re seeing from the Adreno 420 to the Adreno 430 are solely the result of architecture and driver improvements rather than clock speed increases.
As one can see, the One M9 manages to deliver results that basically mirror what we saw with Qualcomm’s MDP/T, although there is some variance that can be seen. HTC did make the right call here with the 1080p display as we see a pretty massive jump in performance from the One M8 to the One M9 in GPU performance, and using a 1440p display would have eaten away most of these gains. I suspect that the hit to GPU performance with 1440p displays will be mostly compensated for by the next generation of SoCs, but for now I’m still not sure that it makes sense to push such a resolution on a phone.
NAND Performance
Storage performance is often an unnoticed aspect of any device, but it can often force itself to the foreground when it’s insufficient. Probably the most famous case of this is the Nexus 7 (2012), which was really the first device that caused people to start to look closer at NAND performance. While we’re close to a better solution for storage testing, for now we can still look at Androbench to get a decent idea of relative storage performance, although this is nowhere near as extensive as our SSD testing.
In this test, HTC does show some level of improvement over the previous generation but does regress a bit in the random read department. As far as I can tell, HTC is using Samsung’s eMMC solution here, with the model name BGND3R, as opposed to the One M8 which used a SanDisk eMMC IC. It's interesting to see how the One M9 still uses ext4 here, even though the Nexus 9 adopted F2FS. As far as I can tell, there seems to be a reason to adopting one filesystem over another but this reason is still unclear to me.
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fokka - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
charge time is measured using the included 1.5A charger, as far as i can tell. this makes sense for most people, but i'd still like to see if a good quick charge 2.0 enabled charger can improve charging time. please?tipoo - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
Lol. Watts already include time.mchart - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
My first entry to Android was the M8 and while I loved Android - I found the M8 wasn't all that great. It had a great spec sheet, but real world battery life and standby time to my 5s was pretty bad. The camera on the M8 was also really bad so I'm glad they fixed that. Sense blows. The worst part about sense is how it locks out any customization of the lock screen. The only widget sense allows is it's own on that lock screen. Horrible. I really hated that.So while I'm sure the m9 is better, it really only seems to fix the camera problem. It doesn't fix the inherent build quality issues I found with the m8s design, and the excessive size of the device.
I haven't given up on Android though. I recently got my Z3 Compact in the mail and it's perfect. It has outstanding real world battery life, has a better physical design, has the top end hardware, and Sony doesn't ruin Android with touch wiz/sense type of crap install all that much.
fokka - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
you seem to have quite unique complaints about the m8, since most points you disliked are things other users and reviews applauded htc for. build, battery, sense... all this are generally considered strengths of the m8.also, as we see, the m9 doesn't really improve on many aspects of the m8, even the camera seems to be as sub par es ever, if we can believe first reviews.
i agree that the z3 compact is a very nice phone, but its hardware isn't truly better than the m8 neither. camera and battery life yes, but the rest is mostly the same or up to personal opinion.
V900 - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
Well battery and camera are a pretty big part of the experience, no?The Z3 compact at least has one thing going for it, the size. It seems to be the only quality Android phone that isn't right around 5 inches. If I would ever switch back to Android from iOS, it would definitely be my first choice...
Yesumanu - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
To wrap things up:- Lackluster screen when compared to M8 and competition
- Generally improved software but either Sense 7 is unoptimised or it's the S810
- Snapdragon 810 dissapointing performance when compared to older Snapdragons
- Throttling
- Battery life is worse with same resolution and size screen, lower brightness, newer SoC and bigger battery
- The camera is better in theory
So basically they took the One M8 improved the camera and software, relocated the power button but at the same time the screen, battery life, performance, and temperatures suffered quite a bit. How do they expect people to buy this phone? Many were already dissapointed when they heard that M9 is only going to be a minimal upgrade, but to see that it's worse that the M8?
hung2900 - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
You forgot cheating in benchmarking also.sonny73n - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
HTC is just like most of other companies - they're just cranking up the specs without really improving anything. They've lost their senses in how to make a great device. Sad.warezme - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
Truly sad, I too have an M7. The size is better than the new M8 and M9, the screen is better and I could get it in black. I don't want another me too gold/silver phone.fokka - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
they should just stop with those fugly gold/champagne/rose colors already. since when is it ok to offer a high end phone in silver/gold dual tone, instead of a pure and simple black?