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
Read First: The HTC One M9 Review Part 1
A good amount of time ago, we posted part one of our HTC One M9 review, which gave a good idea of some critical aspects of the One M9’s performance and design. Unfortunately, due to HTC’s last minute software changes there was a need to redo some of our testing as the changes were quite significant for some key aspects of the user experience, which were effectively any situation where the SoC was in a thermally throttled situation and overall camera performance. I’ve finally finished redoing our testing of the One M9, so we can finish the review and get the full picture of the One M9’s performance. Normally, we’d start by discussing the design of the phone, but much of the review has already been finished with part one. Instead, we’ll start with sustained battery life tests.
Battery Life Continued
As previously detailed, our sustained battery life tests either strongly stress the CPU or GPU. For our GPU tests, we use GFXBench 3.0’s sustained GPU test, which runs the T-Rex benchmark on the display at its native resolution for an infinite rundown test. We didn’t have the modified test to present for a comparison between the two software builds, but we can get a pretty good sense for the changes that have occurred for final shipping software.
As one can see, the One M9 delivered somewhat impressive sustained performance with the pre-release build, but this resulted in almost dangerous skin temperatures and poor battery life on the order of 1.73 hours. The new update produced acceptable skin temperatures, but frame rate drops rather dramatically as skin temperature rises. The end performance actually ends up being quite similar to the One M8, but performance during the test is much higher than what we saw on the One M8.
In the Basemark OS II test, we can see that the One M9 seems to perform poorly. One might be able to argue that the A57s provide more performance, but simple logging shows that past the first 20 minutes the A57 cluster is either shut down or throttled to the minimum clock state, although the A53 cluster manages to stay at 1.56 GHz for the duration of the test. For reference, the One M8 manages to keep the active CPUs at around 1.5 GHz throughout the test.
While Basemark OS II and GFXBench function as power virus tests, I wanted to get a good idea of performance somewhere between these rather extreme tests and the mostly display-bound web browsing test. To do this, I tested a few devices against PCMark’s work battery life benchmark, which shows that the One M9 seems to perform comparably when compared against the One M8. There is a noticeable difference in performance, but the gap isn’t all that big when compared to the M8. More interestingly is that the battery temperature sensor (which isn't necessarily on the battery) gets noticeably higher than the M8, on the order of 5-10C higher.
It’s a bit frightening to see that the gap in performance that we saw with the web browsing test remain. The effects of panel-self refresh would be greatly reduced in these short-running tests, so the differences here are mostly due to the SoC. The level of throttling I’ve seen here is pretty much unprecedented, which doesn’t help with the issue. Overall, the performance of Snapdragon 810 here is bad enough that I would genuinely consider Snapdragon 805 to be an improvement. I can’t help but wonder if this was inevitable though, as leaked roadmaps in the past suggested that Snapdragon 810 would’ve been a very different SoC.
127 Comments
View All Comments
Despoiler - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Nice find. I suspected that HTC just botched their settings based on the first release camera results and how they improved greatly on the second release. They need to keep working on it.rd_nest - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Seriously how many 'usable' shots can you get at 1/2 sec shutter speed without OIS? Even with OIS, I doubt I can get many.http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=599...
^^ This is what is it supposed to show even with all tweaks and manual settings and good lighting condition.
These above photos are littered with overexposed highlights, loss of detail, noise in sky and just wrong colour. They have a weird greenish tint.
Above all, when you want to take a quick photo, you can't do so many changes in settings and try to find the right combination. If I had time, I would take out my DSLR - why worry about a phone camera?
melgross - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Agreed. I take close to 90% of my pictures these days with my phone. I've got expensive DSLRs and lenses. But for many purposes, the phone camera serves the purpose just as well. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true.But the phone camera must be a really good one.
pjcamp - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
I had hopes HTC would finally have fixed their camera problems. Th design of this phone reflects the chaos in the company's upper management. They can't seem to make a camera to save their lives. Literally.smorebuds - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Literally?pjcamp - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link
Just to update you: upon introducing the M9, HTC experienced a 33% month to month decline in revenues and a 39% year to year decline. That shouldn't happen when your latest and greatest hits the market. So yes, they're circling the drain.Stuka87 - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
So you are saying they are all going to die because the camera is no good? That seems a bit harsh...pedromcm.pm - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
The camera (and other problems) will makes people not consider the M9. Why should they, on the first place? As such, HTC will be going down.LordConrad - Friday, April 17, 2015 - link
I doubt it. I almost never use the camera in my phone, and when I do it is to take a quick snap of something funny or interesting I just saw. Any phone camera is good enough for that.pjcamp - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
HTC has been unprofitable or marginally profitable for a very long time. And yes, that will be the death of the company. They needed to do it right and they didn't.