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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Midwayman - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link
With android it almost always seems to be misbehaving apps. Its hard to compare unless you keep the OS stock. I've spent a fair amount of time chasing down wakelocks.Notmyusualid - Sunday, March 22, 2015 - link
My gf noticed too.She went to buy a new Windows phone after she 'fell' into the pool this weekend, drowining the Nokia 820 I bought her. Ok, I dunked her...
But alas the top models were out of stock at the biggest shopping center available. Eventually she left with a Galaxy A7 (Octa core, 5.5" 1080, fast ram, dual sim) and whilst I'm impressed, she, not too much. She really wanted a Windows Phone it seems.
zodiacfml - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
I feel bad. They've focused too much on the physical materials of the phone, hurting the other parts.They could have also went for a larger display at the same resolution to increase battery size and minimize bezels.
This will be competing with the S6 which is the phone to get in 2015 because of its very nice camera.
mchart - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
A larger display is not what it needs. What it needs is the same display but in a chassis that is smaller and doesn't have all that useless area needlessly increasing the size of the phone.Impulses - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
Pretty underwhelming, I'm starting to wonder whether I'll hold on to my current phone even longer than 2 years, it's the first one I've had for more than a year as it is. Z3c was the only thing that tempted me last year...mchart - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
IMO the Z3C is the best phone in the market. It's just a shame it's been largely ignored.I'm an iPhone fan and the Z3C is the first Android running hardware that hasn't led to disappoint for me. Great battery life, great build quality, feels nice in normal usage, has top end hardware packed in, and is running pretty much vanilla Android.
It can be had for a really great price now too. Low $400s, and you can get it in that same price range direct from Sony with a 1 year warranty if you make a free student account to receive 10% off through them.
It's really the best phone if you can't stand/deal with these larger monsters that are frankly a pain to use on a day to day basis for simple things like phone calls.
sonny73n - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
The Z3C has a few problems. It would be the best phone in the market if it had better display and protective glass. I wish my Z3C has the same display quality as the M7 and Gorilla 3 front and back glass.mchart - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
The z3 has gorilla glass front and back. The display is high quality as well. It's just not 1080p. The ppi is still high enough for that size though.V900 - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
Yeah, 1080p is really overkill for a phone right around 4 inches. I honestly couldn't tell the difference between 1080p 720p and the 1136*640 on a 4 inch screen in regular usage. As long as it's above 300 PPI few people would be able to tell...Impulses - Monday, March 23, 2015 - link
If I was buying a phone today I'd probably pick it over my Nexus 5 (are they even still selling the N5?), tho I'd have to switch carriers for it... I'm satisfied with Sprint in my area for now and that's one of the reasons I've kept the N5.A Z3c with Qi wireless charging and OIS would be the perfect compact Android phone IMO. Hopefully Sony doesn't abandon smaller devices (or the smartphone market altogether) any time soon.
Whatever they follow up the Z3c might just be the replacement for the N5 I've had since Nov 2013... I had three HTC phones before the, pretty happy with them, the One just hasn't done it for me.
Ergonomically it's always felt odd and it seems they're treading water in most other senses (no pun intended).