Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HTC One M9 Review!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here – and this is the htc one m9. So last year we had the htc one m8, and that was a really well built phone had some great fast software and a letdown camera. And so this year we have the one m9, which is a really well built phone as great fast software and a letdown camera. So a little background here, i’ve been using this one m9, as my daily driver on and off since mobile congress.
So, a couple of weeks now and yet i still kind of have a little bit of trouble, telling the difference between it and the 1m8, at least from the front, without looking at it for a little bit. That’S because most of the changes with the 1m9 are on the inside uh and for htc. You’Ve probably heard this a thousand times where people talking about this phone, it’s a story of.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and there was not a lot wrong with the original one m8. So for the m9 there’s you know a couple of small adjustments, a couple of tweaks here and there and some small changes to make it better. So this htc one m9 from the front and the back is pretty similar. Looking to the m8, it’s an all metal phone again, but it’s not unibody anymore, so there’s actually several pieces of metal being held together and along the sides.
You get that strip all the way around the phone, that’s a different color. So on my gunmetal m9, that strip is rounded off and black, but on the silver m9, that strip is a new piece of metal. So it’s a bit of a sharper edge and it’s a gold accent and the metal is also now this brushed look and it’s a little more glossy kind of making it a fingerprint magnet, but also making it look a little more like jewelry in a way. So you got a bit of a toss up if you like that or not. It is definitely still a slippery phone, though so be warned. I haven’t installed a skin on mine yet, but i’m pretty sure i’m going to end up doing that.
Just to make sure i never drop it, htc also moved the power button from the top right hand, side to the right hand, side of the phone, which is supposed to be in a more natural easier to reach spot for your thumb. But unfortunately, that’s where the volume buttons already are, so they put the power button underneath those – and i think that was a bad move. The power button is now too low and, to this day i still haven’t gotten used to it and it even if it’s ridged and clicky and separated from the rest. I constantly accidentally press the volume down button like all the time. So what they should have done is move the volume buttons over to the left and had that power button in a normal spot. But the good thing, though, is you still have double tap to wake on the screen and you can even put a sleep wake toggle in the software buttons. If you want, but yeah overall build quality and button placement was not broken, so they had no need to overhaul it to fix it. Another thing that wasn’t broken was the display and the 1m8 had one of the best 1080p displays on any smartphone last year and we’re seeing more quad hd displays this year from basically every manufacturer, but htc is sticking with their trusty 1080p and this lcd as much As i like, pixels is still great, it’s very bright has great colors, great viewing angles and everything, and since it’s still a five inch display, the pixel density is still excellent.
So you won’t be seeing any of the pixels from a normal viewing distance and that awesome display, combined with the best speakers in any smartphone, make for an awesome media experience, whether you’re gaming or watching youtube videos or whatever you’re doing boom sound, is king and second Place isn’t even close now. Htc did add this dolby audio to the m9, which is essentially just a software toggle between two eqs, music mode and theater mode music mode is best for most stuff. I tend to leave it at that. It’S not distorted at all and it gets super loud and crispy, and i love that theater mode is interesting because it simulates a bit of a surround sound effect.
So it can be cool for videos or, if you’re, watching a movie, but it definitely distorts it. A lot more so the build quality not broken the display not broken. The speakers definitely not broken so on to the software and htc has kept it nice and clean with synth 7 on this phone. It’S built on top of android 5.0.2, not sure when it’s going to get the 5.1 update, but i’ll keep an eye out for that. But this is now cleaned up to be actually one of my favorite android skins that exists out there. I still prefer stock android, but i used to really not like htc sense. At all the same way i hated touchwiz, and now there are, there are still you know, a couple parts of it. I don’t like the keyboard, for example, uh constantly infuriates me with this terrible autocorrect.
I hate the keyboard and the quick settings are still pretty ugly to me. I don’t know why oems insist on skinning every little part of android and the quick settings seems like the one that got away these just get uglier all the time. But, aside from stuff like that, you know sense, 7 is a really neat. Skin blinkfeed is tidied up and, of course, still plugs into your social feeds and gives you up-to-date info, and this is the first htc one where i didn’t immediately want to disable and remove blinkfeed.
Although you totally can and also speaking of skins, there’s a whole theme engine built into htc sense now, so if you really don’t like the way it looks stock, there are a ton of skins to pick from and apply that affect. Basically, everything about the software and the ui from the launcher to the software buttons to the app drawer and even the quick settings. So all the colors and all the themed look will be changed and the wallpaper too, and you can grab one of these pre-existing themes or you can build your own theme from a wallpaper or an image, and that is a legit way to customize your phone. Exactly as you want it like a mouse and also it’s android, so a lot of the other elements like the keyboard or like the launcher, you can change those too.
If you don’t like them, there were a lot of other neat tricks built into this version of sense. I liked you can change the multitasking app view to be either the cards, which is what we’re used to in most other versions of android over the past few years or grid view, which is something that htc sort of introduced with the one series that not everybody Liked but now you have the choice, which is a cool way of not exactly backtracking on that, but i do prefer the card view and you also have these screen off gestures. So we saw these in the last one too. You cannot only double tap to wake.
The phone and double tap again to sleep, but there are also a bunch of other swipe direction, functions that you can learn and decide to use and actually enable individually. If you want to use them, i found a lot of these were just going off in my pocket with the last htc one, but i did keep the double tap on because it didn’t do that in my pocket. So that’s pretty cool and these also work very well with the dot view case 2. So that’s a pretty baller combo. Another thing they introduced is this home screen widget, it’s supposed to be a pretty smart thing where it knows if you’re at home. It knows when you’re at work.
It knows when you’re out. All this is from your gps location and, of course, with every phone. That’S tried to guess where i work it thinks my school is where i work, because i go there every day, but it worked. Okay, give me some decent productivity apps. When i went to class and then when i came home it tried to get me to slack off and watch youtube. You know the usual uh and it constantly had these suggested apps too, that weren’t even installed on my phone.
Not sure what that’s about but yeah, it just moved off to the second home screen of mine, and i just kind of left it there to do its thing and i explore once in a while. But if you hated it more than i did, you could easily remove it because it’s just a widget, so yeah. The software experience here on the one m9 is great overall performance too, which i talk about less and less in these reviews, because they keep getting so good. Now is great three gigabytes of ram qualcomm snapdragon 810. That power that thing it’s basically a performance, champ you’ve seen me navigating through it it’s responsive, animations are very short, so everything is snappy and quick, and i never really found an instance to get it to stutter or hold up. It did get warm now.
Some people were asking if my m9 ever overheated, it did get warmer than other phones. I played with recently for sure, especially when charging or using with the screen on for a very long period of time, but i never actually overheated like. I had with some other phones like the g3, where it had.
You know limited functionality because of the heat the metal body of this phone does get very warm to the touch when you’re intensely gaming, but generally it’s actually nothing to worry about, and the battery life has been decent, actually, the 1m9. It gives you a really detailed breakdown of the battery usage in the software, but it doesn’t actually give you a screen on time. So i felt like i was getting my usual three to three and a half – maybe four hours of screen on time, but i couldn’t actually see a number at the end of the day. So i just go by the fact that i was ending the day with 15 to 20 battery left to tell that it was pretty good normal usage. I had one weird anomaly day where it died early, but overall battery life was pretty good. Now, undoubtedly, the biggest challenge htc had when going from the one m8 to the m9 was the one part of the phone that people did consider broke.
That’S the camera. The htc one m8 biggest flaw last year was its back facing 4 megapixel or ultra pixel camera. It was actually a bit of a downgrade from the m7 which had optical image stabilization, so that was the biggest change of philosophy this time around, as the 1m9 has a 20 megapixel camera, so the ultra pixels are almost gone.
The front facing camera actually is still a pretty decent ultra pixel selfie camera, but now everyone is curious. Just how good is the slightly protruding 20 megapixel camera on the back of the m9? Well, it’s still not that good and that’s unfortunate because we all like to take pictures on our phones and normally it’s not a problem or anything, but this one is especially not good. So 20 megapixels yeah, that’s nice, that’s great and everything pixels are sharper. You have more detail than before, but the camera here is a classic case of more megapixels, doesn’t always equal better pictures. The main problem here is dynamic range, so you know how you normally tap on the viewfinder to set the brightness of your photo. Whatever you tap it on, it changes the auto exposure, that’s nice and quick and snappy on this phone, and it’s taking a picture is just as snappy too, but it’s almost never exposed correctly.
To get everything i want. The dynamic range is terrible on this camera and, as a result, no matter how hard i try, there’s always something way, overexposed and blown out or way underexposed and too in the dark like every photo. I take has this problem so naturally i turn on hdr to try to get some high dynamic range stuff, but the effect is kind of overly strong and doesn’t look natural anymore, and all of that combined with almost embarrassing 4k video. That kind of looks like upscaled 720p. Ah, it’s just a frustrating cameraman and i wanted to be good. So much now look there’s been talks.
There’S been talks about a software upgrade that could potentially make this better, and usually that can happen, but for this one i’m thinking it’s the hardware, i’m putting the blame on the hardware. It really shouldn’t be this bad and if you look it up most other high-end android smartphones, even the iphone use a sony sensor. These things are tried-and-true and produce some spectacular images. For some weird reason, htc went with some random toshiba built sensor, and that would be where i placed the blame. It all kind of makes sense. The poor dynamic range, the washed out color, even the best image processing – probably can’t save this one, and i say that with regret because, like i said, i wanted it to be a lot better. So, overall, as a package, this one m9 is still a really good phone and for people coming from the one m7, the first htc one. This is gon na, be an awesome upgrade and for the one i made probably less, of a critical one, especially if you don’t take a lot of photos. If you do take a lot of photos on your smartphone and you’re used to having a good camera in your pocket, this is sort of a hit or miss thing again. Some of the photos it takes can look pretty good, but there are better android camera experiences out there and the iphone takes better pictures and some windows phones take better pictures.
So if you have cameras and photo and video taking high on your list of priorities when you’re buying a smartphone 1m9 is probably not at the top of your list. That being said, like i said at the beginning of this video, this is an extremely well built phone with great fast software, and that’s what it’s doing really really well here, and it doesn’t hurt that it has the best speakers on any phone period and also happens To have a gorgeous 1080p display, so that’s it for the 1m9 uh. If you enjoyed this video review feel free to leave a thumbs up below if you liked it there’s also a subscribe button below. If you want to see more videos like this feel free to tap that and i’ll talk to you guys in the next article peace .