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.
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Speedfriend - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
"The Android death knell sounds. "1bn people who purchased one last year disagree....
But if Microsoft could actually get its act together, it could take serious market share. Apple will never take the share as it is simply too expensive for 95% of android users.
mrochester - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I meant that Android leads to the eventual decline to bottom feeder status/death due to the platform being the same across all devices.jabber - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
So in that case Apple iPhone should be..what/where exactly?KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
iOS is where it is now, which is the high end mobile platform where most developers, enterprise, games, apps, and paying users are.High end Android was always a niche but it was a niche with the potential to overtake Apple. Unfortunately for the last two years it has been a niche in decline. I mostly blame Google and Samsung. This BS from HTC is icing on the cake.
Quidam67 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I don't often post on Anandtech but when I do it is because I've almost been moved to tears. I bought the HTC One M7 because I knew HTC was in trouble and I wanted to my tiny little bit to support a small company who had made a genuinely great phone. I skipped the M8 because upgrading every generation is just a bit silly on the pocket and because it was not muc of an upgrade anyway. I was looking forward to the M9 but this is a disaster of a product. Not only is not not better than the M8, it is not better than the M7. I can only see 2 things happening. Either they put out a revised Phone/model half way through this current generations life-cycle that dramatically fixes the glaring issues and/or offers something that stands out in the market, or they go to the wall and pheonix explodes into ashes, this time for good. RIP HTC.HangFire - Wednesday, April 15, 2015 - link
I couldn't have said it better myself.skells - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
For the performance degradation chart, rather than having the average fps on the x axis, wouldn't it be better to have (% of initial fps during last test run) as it is an indication of the impact of thermal throttling and will be more comparable across devices.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Seconded. That'd make much more sense.@siraltonstyles - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Wowza! How unfortunate. I've been team HTC since the G2. But, I will not be upgrading from my M8 to the M9. That thing has a faulty processor, a mediocre camera experience, a display that is lacking in pretty much every area, and uncompetitive battery life. I'll check it out in my local tmobile store and if it's actually better than the review states (which I doubt, cuz this is anandtech not bgr), I'll purchase it. If the review is dead on (which I expect it to be), I'll be purchasing the 64gb black S6. I hate to say this, but the M9 might be the nail in the coffin for HTCs Mobile business.Fidelator - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I'm really starting to believe that ARM found a gold mine with big.LITTLEI'm fairly sure they work hard to keep the performance to power consumption and heat generation ratio of A15/A57 cores well above anything sustainable on mobile designs based entirely on them
Therefore FORCING their partners to pay more per SoC since all SoCs now MUST use not 2 or 4 ARM cores but 6 and in most cases 8 cores after adding the necessary A7/A53 cores(and paying more for each extra one) to stay competitive.
I can hardly believe they keep thinking big.LITTLE is the best way to go considering how Apple's designs (and Qualcomms Krait as A15s competition) have proven to behave better while also keeping power consumption and heat generation in check.
Literally the ONLY big.LITTLE SoC that hasn't had inconsistent and unreliable performance is the Exynos 7420 and maybe, but to a much lesser extent the 5433.
I really hope to start seeing more custom cores soon.