The HTC One M9 Review: Part 2
by Joshua Ho on April 6, 2015 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Qualcomm
- Mobile
- Snapdragon 810
- One M9
WiFi Performance
Fundamentally, a smartphone is defined by its ability to connect to the internet. Although cellular data is important, WiFi performance is crucial for anyone on a limited data plan and in areas where cellular data is slow or nonexistent. To this end, HTC has outfitted the One M9 with Broadcom’s BCM4356 WiFi/BT combo chipset, which we’ve seen before in the Nexus 6. This chipset supports 2x2 802.11ac, but the One M9 only supports a maximum 433 Mbps physical link rate, which means that it’s only using a single spatial stream. I haven’t been able to find any information on the antenna configuration of the One M9, but it’s likely that HTC is only using a single antenna for WiFi on the One M9 which would make it similar to the One M7 and One M8 in that regard. In order to test how this configuration performs, we use IPerf on Android connected to a PC to see how rapidly the device can send UDP packets.
As one can see, there’s a reasonable performance uplift when compared to Qualcomm Atheros’ WCN3680 WiFi/BT combo chip, but it isn’t as big as moving to a 2x2 MIMO configuration. The lack of MIMO also has implications for WiFi range, but WiFi signals degrade quickly enough that this wouldn’t be a massive difference.
GNSS
As the One M9 uses a Qualcomm modem, it's a pretty safe bet that it also uses the modem for GNSS location services. In practice, this means that the One M9 locks on to satellites quickly any time it's possible to download assistance data to speed up GPS.
Without assistance data, the One M9 seems to have worse performance than expected, although weather conditions can always affect overall performance. Time to first lock took a minute and 42 seconds, and accuracy wasn't quite as high as one would hope, tending towards 30 foot accuracy rather than 10 foot accuracy. It's likely that local weather conditions were responsible for this issue, as subjectively it seemed that GPS performance was comparable to other phones tested at the same time.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
127 Comments
View All Comments
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.