Whether you admit it or not, HTC ONE series smart phones have the most unique appearance design in the Android camp, and HTC is quite confident about its own design. On this year's M9, all classic design elements have been retained, but in the body that looks nothing new, there are new hardware and software. How many buyers will there be?
Specifications:
5-inch 1080p IPS screen, 441ppi, Corning gorilla glass 4;
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, 4 × Cortex-A57@2GHz +4× [email protected] ， Adreno 430 GPU，3GB RAM；
Sense 7 UI based on Android 5.0 operating system;
Rear 20 million pixel 1/2.3 "CMOS sensor, 27.8mm wide angle, F/2.2 aperture, dual color temperature LED fill light;
The front 4 megapixel UltraPixel camera, 26.8mm wide angle, F/2.0 aperture, supports HDR and 1080p video recording;
BoomSound dual speakers, Dolby sound effect support;
32GB expandable storage;
The 2840 mAh built-in battery supports Qualcomm Fast Charge 2.0 technology.
Appearance design and workmanship:
Many people will complain about the "new" appearance of the M9 this time. However, it is hard to deny that the M9 is really a beautiful mobile phone. Maybe after the metal body design of the ONE series has developed to the third generation, HTC may have made some compromises for the aesthetic factors of the East and the West, but in terms of hand feel and high-end sense, the metal body of ONE series is still difficult for competitors to compete.
Anyway, HTC still heard the user's complaints about some design factors on M8 and made appropriate improvements on M9, The side of the body of the M9 is quite crowded. On the right side of the body, there is a metal MicroSD card slot, two metal volume buttons with separate design, and the power button that has finally been moved to the side of the body. There are also excellent lines above the power button to distinguish it from the volume button, while on the left side of the body is the NanoSIM card slot.
The top of the body is an infrared transmitter, and the bottom is the familiar MicroUSB interface and 3.5mm headphone interface.
As for the design of the front of the body, it is similar to the M8. The three-stage design, stereo dual speakers, and distance sensors are all in place. The overall thickness of the M9 is thicker than that of the S6, excluding the camera.
The back of the fuselage only uses a single camera design. The camera has a bulge, and the shape of the camera has been changed to a rectangle.
On the M9, the redesigned power key has greatly improved the ease of use, making single handed use more convenient. Although HTC also provides the function of double click wake-up, it is still necessary to use the lock screen button to lock the device without installing additional programs.
The frame of the M9 fuselage makes the grip of the M9 significantly different from that of the M8. Although this makes the M9 fuselage grip less slippery, some people may feel that the M9 grip is not so comfortable. In addition, the M9 still provides an unparalleled high-end grip in the market.
Screen:
HTC's flagship has always had a tradition of good screens. This year, the M9 screen in the paper specification has not received any upgrade. Maybe HTC also believes that the higher resolution screen has not actually improved the user's actual experience except slowing down the system operation. Anyway, at least the fineness of this screen is excellent.
However, we were a little surprised that the M9 did not change its screen specifications, but its actual performance was not as good as we expected. First, the color temperature of the screen reached 8100K, which rose again compared with the previous M8's 7200K, and was further away from the standard value of 6500K, meaning that the M9 screen was significantly cooler and the color restoration was not accurate enough.
However, in terms of brightness, the M9 screen performs well. The maximum 508nit brightness is higher than the M8 490nit, and the 1:1347 contrast is also excellent. It seems that this screen is very good as long as the color restoration performance is ignored.
Endurance:
Compared with Samsung's Galaxy S6, the M9 has obvious advantages in battery capacity. The built-in 2840 mAh capacity is 11% larger than the 2550 mAh capacity of the S6. In addition, the M9 is only equipped with a 1080p screen, so theoretically, the endurance will be more advantageous. The previous M8 has good endurance performance under both 4.4 and 5.0 systems. We should trust HTC.
However, the final result is somewhat different from our medical treatment, The comprehensive endurance of the M9 is rated as 62 hours, which means that it can last two and a half days under the intensity of one hour of voice calls, one hour of web browsing and one hour of video playback every day, which is not satisfactory to us - in contrast, the endurance of the Galaxy S6 with higher screen resolution and smaller battery is rated as 64 hours, It can provide longer video playback duration and web browsing duration.
User interface:
Sense 7 is one of the major selling points of M9. Although M8 will also be supported by Sense 7 in future system updates, we have reason to believe that M9 with better hardware performance will have more smooth system performance.
The lock screen interface of Sense 7 is no different from that of Sense 6. Weather, clock and four shortcuts will also display notifications on the lock screen like many other Android 5.0 phones. Naturally, these notifications also include the catering suggestions provided by BlinkFeed and the information about the nearby restaurants where users are located.
The lock screen gesture is also available. Double click the bright screen and slide directly to unlock it. The desktop after unlocking is the same as Sense 6, and there is no need to say more here.
The BlinkFeed interface is still the same as before. It gathers social networks, news sources, and even users can search specific content information. In addition, BlinkFeed also adds the function of catering recommendation, and if a friend leaves a comment on a comment website, it will be displayed in it.
The new function of Sense 7 also includes a "Sense Home" The plug-in will provide eight shortcuts, six are applications, and the remaining two are folders, which are recommended applications according to the user's location and settings. Click to download them. However, it should be noted that these shortcuts are not user-defined. After the user enters the home and work address, All changes are automatic.
Another highlight of Sense 7 is the new theme function. Changing the theme can change the lock screen and desktop wallpaper, APP drawer background, native SMS application background, system color matching and icons, ringing tones and even system fonts, and HTC also provides the theme store function - all very good.
In the multi task switching interface, the user can select the 9-grid display mode like Sense 6, or the 3D card mode of Android 5.0, and can lock an application to run in the background, so that the locked tasks will be retained when clearing.
Although the notification bar adopts a native style similar to Android 5.0, the order of various buttons can be customized, which is convenient enough for users to use.
Performance:
The HTC ONE M9 is the second Snapdragon 810 mobile phone on the market, which uses the eight core size core design of the public version of ARM, plus 3GB RAM. In theory, the HTC ONE M9 will be among the best in this year's flagship mobile phone performance rankings.
Unfortunately, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor has a serious heating problem. The early M9 even reached a "hot" temperature during performance testing. HTC later pushed a system update to fix this problem, but it is estimated that only a more radical frequency reduction was used.
The M9 will have a very obvious heat when running score tests and games, and the temperature will rise very quickly. In the daily web browsing, the M9 will also have a significant heat. After the fuselage heats up, the performance will decline significantly. After the latest OTA push system update to improve the heat, GeekBench's score decreased from 4020 points before the update to 3761 points, and Anthare's score decreased from 57900 to 51727 points, which also positively confirmed that we have updated the content of this OTA pushed by HTC - more aggressive frequency reduction measures to control fever. The following scores are based on the updated system pushed by HTC.
In fact, the memory performance of the M9 is quite good, and it outperforms the Galaxy Note 4 in terms of sequence reading and writing. However, compared with the Galaxy S6, which uses a newer generation of UFS 2.0 flash memory, it still ranks second. Maybe we will see the new generation of high-speed memory on the next generation of HTC flagship phones.
In fact, thanks to the performance of the Adreno 430 and the screen resolution of only 1080p, the M9 will perform well in large games. In the screen closing test only considering the performance of the GPU, the Adreno 430 also draws with the MALI-T760 MP8 in the Galaxy S6. However, the actual experience of the latter may be slightly inferior to that of the M9 due to the resolution.
In fact, despite the running score, the daily operation of the M9 is very fast. It is not difficult to see from the test scores of CPU and GPU that the comprehensive performance of the M9 is quite excellent without frequency reduction. The only thing that disappointed us is the web browsing performance of the M9.
As mentioned earlier, the heat output of M9 is quite considerable. After the OTA is updated to the new system, the speed of temperature rise decreases slightly, at least not as unbearable as before. Maybe in summer, the situation will be worse.
Looking at the Snapdragon 810 mobile phones that have been tested so far, the obvious phenomenon of hot prizes is widespread. The recently exposed Snapdragon 815 processor is said to have better performance in heat control, but it is unrealistic to see the 815 processor on this year's flagship mobile phones.
In addition, the Anandtech website also tested the problem of 810 processor heating and frequency reduction. When HTC ONE M9 was used for CPU single thread test (yes, only one core single thread test was enabled), The A57 core can only run to 1.5~1.6 GHz. After the test time is extended, the frequency will drop to 1~1.2 GHz. Only in the "specially optimized" scoring software will the system release the frequency limit and let the A57 Pentium to 2.0 GHz. However, it will soon pay the price of overheating and frequency reduction for such a short period of Pentium.
Camera:
The M9 finally got on the 20 megapixel camera. Maybe a single 20 megapixel camera is not fun for those who like the special play method of dual lenses. But for most users, a higher pixel camera is always a better selling point, but the sensor of this camera is from Toshiba, not Sony.
The M9 can take pictures of 5376 × 3752 pixels at most, perhaps because of the internal space of the fuselage, the M9 is also not equipped with an optical anti shake lens set, but the diversified photography modes should be able to make up for the lack of optical anti shake.
From the daytime still photos taken, M9 This 20 megapixel camera can take very beautiful pictures with good daytime light, but there are quite a few noise spots in the picture. It seems that HTC has not used too many noise reduction measures this time, which naturally aims to preserve as many details as possible. We have no complaints about this practice. The picture details are very rich and the exposure is accurate, The color is bright and the white balance is basically accurate.
Although the overall image quality is slightly different from what we expected, compared with other mobile phones equipped with 20 million pixel cameras on the market at present, the performance of the M9 is the best. Compared with the predecessor M8, the M9 is naturally a second kill.
In the photos taken at night, M9 has carried out very obvious smear noise reduction, which directly led to the loss of almost all details of the picture after magnification, but at least the color performance is good, which is quite different from the daytime performance.
In terms of HDR photo shooting effect, the M9 performance is OK, and many details of the dark part of the picture have been found. On the M9, HTC has also improved the HDR algorithm, and the overall composite effect and photo quality are much better than the previous HTC ONE flagship phone (below is the sample of HDR opening).
The effect of the front camera is good, and the details, brightness and color of the picture are impressive.
Summary:
With the latest Qualcomm processor, the latest Android operating system, the latest Sense UI, the BoomSound speaker with Dolby sound effects, and a camera that can finally match the flagship phone, HTC should have launched an all-around flagship like the M9 long ago. The beautiful metal integrated body is as delicate as ever, and the design of the two-color body makes the whole more dynamic.
Holding the M9 in your hand, the processed aluminum alloy body provides an incomparable grip. Maybe the screen share of the M9 is slightly lower, but after getting used to it, it will not affect normal use. Although the built-in Snapdragon 810 processor has a serious problem of overheating and frequency reduction, it is at least the strongest processor that Qualcomm can provide at present, In addition, the GPU performance is quite impressive, so there is no problem in driving the 1080p screen to deal with large games. To be honest, for those flagship phone buyers who do not want to choose Samsung and iPhone this year, do you have any other choice besides Qualcomm?
As for M9's strongest rivals, it is natural that the iPhone 6/6 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S6 released in the same period have noble LOGO, while the latter is the strongest Android phone at present, equipped with a 2K resolution screen with excellent quality in all aspects, a lighter and compact body, a more powerful Exynos 7420 processor, faster LPDDR4 RAM and UFS 2.0 memory chips, In addition, the camera with optical anti shake addition is also significantly better than the M9. On the premise that the endurance of the two is equal (S6 is actually slightly better when the battery capacity is smaller), Compared with S6, the M9 has only an excellent all metal body as an advantage, but S6's materials are not inferior this time. Glass and metal have their own supporters, and consumers have the right to choose.
advantage:
The machine body is exquisite, with incomparable grip and appearance;
The brightness and contrast of the screen are good;
The Sense UI has rich functions and maintains the lightweight and smooth characteristics;
The 20 megapixel camera can take excellent pictures, and the front camera has excellent effect;
The performance is very good without frequency reduction.
Disadvantages:
The rear camera has too much noise;
Average endurance;
810 processor overheating and frequency reduction seriously affect performance;
The screen color is normal.
Original text and pictures from
Screen test results from
Some pictures come from
