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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asfletch - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
Preach! Removable battery is big reason why I narrowed my choices recently to Note 4 or LG G5/V10, and only the fear of bootlooping (again a longevity issue, seems to happen to many people after several months of ownershup) put me off the LGs. I will only buy sealed-battery phones in future if I absolutely have to, and I would love to know how hard it'd be to change their batteries.Impulses - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
1. Agreed... But I can easily imagine logistical reasons why AT isn't allowed to open (and potentially destroy) review samples or personally bought devices, so we'll probably have to find this info elsewhere. I'm glad my N5 was easy to open even tho I never thought I'd keep it for 3 years.2. This is subjective, how hard is it to occasionally do some cleanup? Yeah, I know people actually toss phones over things as simple as full storage but c'mon, this is AT. I can see how a couple of comments about SD removal would be useful, tho I rarely took mine out when I had phones with them (specially after USB OTG and faster Wi-Fi came of age), phone has never been my primary camera either tho.
3. This is actually way too much of a moving target, and Samsung has actually been amongst the best at keeping non-carrier hobbled flagship models updated. HTC has probably been more consistent if you go farther back than the last 2-3 years tho... AT's forte has never been on the software side anyway.
4. Even more of a moving target with different carriers imposing different policies... And probably less relevant to the mass market. I don't think having a rooted Android device is nearly as attractive as it used to be, various drivers issue tend to make user/dev ROMs a dice roll when you're talking about unsupported Android versions.
If you care that much about that stuff you'll either research it at a place like Xda or you'll just get a Nexus, IMO. FWIW I think HTC still has far more user friendly policy regarding bootloader unlock than Samsung does.
AT phone reviews have always seemed to straddle an enthusiast/mass market line... They dive deep into hardware but only so much as in how it directly affects the user, and I don't think any big time site will ever cover things like how easy it is to repair, mod, etc. Just the nature of the beast, it's post because of the manufacturer relationships but also logistics. There's places like iFixit, XDA, and forums for that...
Zoomer - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
The SD tray is similar to the nanoSIM tray. Use a paperclip. It's more of a install once and forget kind of thing. Just pop in a 128 or 256 fast SD and forget about it. Far easier to transfer files by connecting a USB cable, which incidentally charges it.sevenmack - Friday, September 30, 2016 - link
Additionally, on the matter of two MicroSD ports: Most people barely use the one they have, often using a 32gb or 64gb card that is plenty for them. Enthusiasts such as myself would love two MicroSD ports, but I would also rather have a 500gb MicroSD card that would work for all my needs.As for teardowns to see how easy it is to replace a battery: Again, most people (including many enthusiasts) would never bother doing that. They would just buy another phone when the two-year update period comes up. Besides, iFixit provides ample enough information on that.
Fidelator - Monday, September 26, 2016 - link
You should be hired for this site, your thoughts are above and beyondVagabondjonez - Thursday, October 6, 2016 - link
I definitely agree with you 👍eclectech - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
I've had my HTC 10 for months but I learned a lot reading this review. Thanks to your review, I also disabled Chrome and Google Photos, once I found the APKs for HTC Internet and HTC Gallery.Gunbuster - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
Let me just type this out: Six.Hundred.DollarsJust got a BLU R1 HD today. $60, the end of ridiculous phone prices is nearing the end. It's not sustainable. I'm a techie and this phone is good enough. What makes a $600+ phone 10 times better?
ACM.1899 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
Most buyers aren't techie....most of them are 15-30 years old that want to play HD games, watch FHD videos, listen to hq music...they want the best (based on Media or Gsmarena) and don't care that much about the money...they go to a store and all they can see is SAMSUNG and APPLE or let's say huawei...huawei used to be cheap, but now?...not much.
i think the only factor that would make a phone 10 times better (for "ordinary" buyers) is that it lasts 10 times(or whatever time that compensate the money).
look at HTC HD2 ,recently i saw one that could run Android 7...but NOT that good or smooth or enough ram left to run something else and it's a 7 years old phone. and we know that those who flash a custom rom or even root their phone is nothing compared to "ordinary" buyers.
btw in some countries you're stuck with whatever your carriers sell you.
ACM.1899 - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
And let's not forget about "Capitalism"