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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TrojMacReady - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Colors were more accurate, resolution a hair higher, contrast and blacklevels were seriously lagging compared to the S2, speed of the phone was quite a bit slower, camera was much worse too.CrazyElf - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Thanks for the review.It's a disappointing phone. I wonder what they were thinking about when they made this? Hmm, probably not much on how it would be received.
zodiacfml - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Heartbreaking even without the S6. The S6 is just too good right now.mhaager2 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Joshua, your concerns regarding the snapdragon 810, do you think they are device specific or can we expect this to hold true across different flagship phones? I'm waiting for the Xperia Z4 but wondering if it's worth it compared to the 801 in the Z3kspirit - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I hope the Z4 and G4 both use the S808 or even 805 instead of this (literally) hot mess.lilmoe - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Ouch. That horrible SoC might have been OK to swallow, but the camera is definitely a deal breaker for many...They could have stuck with the exact same design and internals of the M8 while dramatically improving the camera, and it would have been much more of an upgrade than ^this...
On a side note, HTC SERIOUSLY needs to reconsider the internal design and layout of components. Repairing the One, _any One_, is a nightmare.
Gunbuster - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Repair has been a nightmare since always for HTC, Touch Pro's and Radar come to mind.Dorek - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I was going to replace my Radar's battery before I decided to just buy a new phone, and it didn't look too awful...Gunbuster - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Battery is okay, anything involving the screen stack that is glued to the digitizer...Also super easy to wreck the microphone mylar flex cable.
tom5 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So to wrap-up: HTC had quite a nice device to start with - the HTC One M8, but decided to ruin it all, starting with the camera subsystem which is a joke, followed by a I'm_A_Mistake_SoC - the 810. Samsung knew what they were doing when they chose their own Exynos to power the S6.It's a pity because I really like HTC devices. Having put so much emphasis on the camera features I just can't believe what they did in this area with the M9. They wanted to "buy" us with the megapixel count or what?