HTC One M9 review: Much hyped, but a disappointing update

Like the HTC One M8 before it – in fact, pretty much identically to at a glance – the HTC One M9 remains a stylish phone to look at in 2016, but is it worth buying at this point in its life? Well, it has now had the upgrade to Android Marshmallow, which is a big plus, but in other areas it’s beginning to lag behind a little. The camera, which was weak at the time, is now blown away by stronger contenders in the form of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Sony Xperia Z5.

Most contracts have it around the £30 mark for 24 months, meaning it’ll be January 2018 before you pay it off – at which point the M9 will look somewhat long in the tooth. It’s still a good phone for now, but others have held up better in the specs, even if the M9 is still quite the looker. Here are our favourite phones right now, or read on to read what we thought of the M9 a year ago: 

HTC has struggled in recent years to top the efforts of Samsung in the Android smartphone space. But the HTC One M7 and last year’s HTC One M8 were positively received in most parts of the media, and it’s clearly aiming to capitalise on that good press with the HTC One M9.

At the same time, it doesn’t want to move away from this successful formula, so despite all the hype, it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise to find that there isn’t a huge amount different about HTC’s new flagship model.

Design and appearance

Just like the M8 before it, the HTC One M9 is hewn from metal, and it’s the same size, too, with a 5in screen upfront, and a similar configuration of sensor, camera and speaker paraphernalia above and below the screen. From a distance, you might struggle to tell the two apart.

HTC hasn’t completely left the design alone, however. Although it has the same, gently curved rear panel as its predecessor, it no longer wraps smoothly around the sides of the phone. Instead, the M9 has defined edges, flattened sides and a step between those edges and the front of the phone.

Empirically, this represents a tiny improvement; practically, though, it does feel different in your hand. These edges give you more grip on the phone than the smoother, more slippery M8. And in another small yet significant improvement, HTC has added a scratch-resistant coating to the rear of the phone.I haven’t yet had the phone for long enough to say how effective this is in the long term, but I haven’t noticed any scratches or scuffs so far.

The most visible difference between last year’s M8 and the HTC One M9, however, is the range of colours in which it will be available. My test unit was the silver and gold version, with the back finished in brushed silver and the sidewalls in rose gold, but the phone will also be available with a dark gunmetal-grey rear with mirrored edges, with a gold rear and gold mirrored edges, and a rather more lurid pink.

If this all sounds a little garish, rest assured that in the flesh the HTC One M9 actually looks rather tasty. The one thing I don’t like about the way it looks – and didn’t like about the M8, in fact – is the black plastic insert on the top edge, which hides the phone’s infrared transmitter.

Around the rest of the edges, you’ll find SIM and microSD drawers on either side at the top, the power and volume buttons on the right, and the headphone and micro-USB sockets on the bottom, right next to one another. The headphone socket placement is a little odd, and the buttons sit rather too flush to the edge of the chassis for my liking, but otherwise the HTC One M9 is a well-designed handset.

Camera quality and sample images

Look more closely at the HTC One M9 and you may spy one more external change. Where last year’s M8 had a pair of cameras on the rear – one 4-megapixel shooter for the images, and another for capturing depth-of-field data for image refocusing – the M9 has just the one. It’s now a 20-megapixel unit, which is also capable of capturing 4K video.

The camera is fronted with a piece of tough sapphire glass, has an aperture of f/2.2 and it’s accompanied by HTC’s dual-LED, dual-colour Duo Flash. In some respects, it’s an upgrade on last year’s One M8, but in others it’s a downgrade. Unlike Samsung, Apple and LG’s flagship smartphones, the HTC One M9’s camera lacks phase-detect autofocus, which means it hunts around a bit more for focus than its rivals do. It also doesn’t have optical image stabilisation (OIS).

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, image quality really ought to be a lot better than it is. In daylight, detail is lost through over-processing and over-compression; despite the 20-megapixel sensor, it delivers less detail than the 16-megapixel camera in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. In low light,  there’s all sorts of trouble, with shots coming out blurry more often than not, and over-compression striking to rob photographs of precious detail.

Examining the EXIF data on my test shots shows that, essentially, the M9 prefers low shutter speeds to fast ISO settings when the flash is turned off. In good light this isn’t a problem, but as soon as the light dims, the M9 drops the shutter speed to unsuitable levels (oddly it commonly drops to 1/14sec); the result is loads of blur and totally unusable photographs.

Indeed, independent tests carried out by DxO, the company behind the excellent DxO Optics Pro image processing software, delivered similarly damning results. In its laboratory tests of the HTC One M9’s camera, it found its photo and video output were no better than those produced by the three-year-old iPhone 4S, and equal to last year’s HTC One M8. Its overall DxOMark Mobile score of 69 puts it a long way behind the top-scoring Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, which gained 86 in the same set of tests.

It’s a shame, because I like the simplified, revamped camera software. It does a great job of putting advanced controls at your fingertips in manual mode, making it easy to adjust white balance, shutter speed, exposure compensation and focus, while leaving the camera in automatic mode keeps things simple and straightforward. The front-facing camera is pretty good, too. It’s basically the main rear camera from last year’s M8, with a resolution of 4 megapixels, and selfies look largely crisp and well balanced.

Specs and performance

All the M9’s horsepower is provided by this year’s top-end Qualcomm chip, the octa-core Snapdragon 810, which comprises twin quad-core CPUs operating at a frequency of 2GHz and 1.5GHz respectively. Graphics are dealt with by an Adreno 430 GPU, and there’s 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (expandable by up to 128GB via microSD card). In terms of connectivity, there are no surprises, with support for 4G, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4 and NFC. You don’t get wireless charging, though.

It’s a strong line-up and results in the benchmarks were highly impressive. In the GFXBench T-Rex HD (onscreen) test, the M9 returned a frame rate of 49fps – no Android phone we’ve tested so far matches that. It’s as fast as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in these tests. Likewise, in Geekbench 3, single- and multi-core scores of 838 and 3,677 soundly trounce all comers. And the HTC One M9 remains among the fastest phones I’ve tested, despite the appearance of a number of strong rivals since its launch.

Even burdened with the extra weight of HTC’s Sense 7 launcher software, the phone feels very responsive indeed. Everyday tasks such as browsing Google Maps or hefty web pages – even updating apps while playing games – don’t tax the HTC One M9 unduly, and it will play and record 4K video without breaking sweat. Despite widespread reports of overheating, I can’t say I had a problem: the M9 gets warm when playing games, and warmer still when running benchmarks, but it never reaches truly uncomfortable levels.

As for battery life, HTC has boosted the capacity over the M8 by 240mAh, to 2,840mAh. We’d hoped that stamina would be improved, especially with the Snapdragon 810 SoC moving to 20nm. If anything, though, battery life has taken a hit with the M9. Standby battery life looks to be better – streaming a podcast over 4G using the SoundCloud app ate capacity at a rate of 2.61% per hour versus 3.8% for the M8 – but with the screen on, video playback consumed battery at a faster rate of 9.7%, compared with 6.5%.

In real-world use, I found the M9 was equally disappointing. With even moderate use, I regularly needed to recharge before the end of the day, when I’d started it with a full 100% on the gauge. In contrast, the HTC One M8 regularly lasted into a second day of use.

On the plus side, the HTC One M9 now supports Quick Charge, which does mitigate the battery-life issue somewhat, delivering a good wallop of charge in ten minutes or so, and a full charge in less than two hours. Alas, HTC doesn’t supply a compatible charger in the box – just a bog-standard 7.5W USB charger.

Display and audio

Flying in the face of flagship smartphone trends, the HTC One M9 has a mere 5in Full HD, 1,080 x 1,920 display. Although this sounds behind the times, it’s perfectly sharp at normal viewing distances. It’s very bright as well, reaching 462cd/m2 at maximum brightness, so readability in bright sunshine won’t be an issue. Contrast is absolutely superb at 1,310:1, and HTC has changed the axis of the polarised layer in the screen so that it doesn’t black out in portrait mode.

In terms of its colour performance, however, the Super LCD 3 technology used in the panel trails significantly behind its rivals. In testing, the panel was able to reproduce 87.2% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is decent, but not nearly as good as the AMOLED displays on Samsung’s flagships are able to reproduce. Colour accuracy was also less than ideal, with the M9 recording an average Delta E of 3.17 and a maximum of 7.6. As a result colours looked a little off, particularly the reds, which are muddier than they ought to be.

The front-facing BoomSound speakers above and below the screen, however, are unequivocally a success. For speakerphone conversations, YouTube how-to videos and streaming radio, the HTC One M9 gives every other smartphone brand an audio drubbing, and if you ramp up the ringtone volume, there’s absolutely no danger of missing a call.

With the speakers off and the phone clamped to your ear, the HTC also put in a first-class performance, with calls coming through loud and clear with no sign of distortion.

HTC One M9: Android Lollipop and Sense 7

Naturally, the HTC One M9 has Android 5 Lollipop at its core; however, there isn’t much evidence of that in the user interface since, as usual, the HTC’s customised Sense UI dominates most aspects of the front-end.

However, HTC has given its software a light upgrade, and Sense 7 is the result. Chief among the new features this year is the ability to apply themes throughout the UI, not only in terms of colour sets, but also icons, fonts and sounds. The HTC-supplied themes look superb, and really lift Sense above rivals’ efforts in terms of overall look, but it doesn’t end there.

Sense can automatically generate custom themes based on the colour content of your lockscreen and wallpaper images; it’s also possible to customise and create themes then upload them, or download themes created by other HTC One M9 owners. You can spend hours tinkering with the appearance of Sense 7 until you find something that looks just right for you.

The new Sense Home widget is an equally big change. By default, this occupies the screen space left below the HTC clock and Google search box, and is also aware of where and when you are. Essentially, it selects which apps to display depending on whether you’re Home, Out or at Work, and the selection of apps within each profile changes over time and adapts to your usage patterns. I like the idea, but I can’t say it’s something I’d been hankering for before, and before long I just wanted to get back to a standard Android homescreen. Fortunately, it is possible to pin apps to the widget or remove it wholesale.

I was slightly less keen on HTC’s Smart Folders, which reside on the Sense Home widget in the bottom-right corner, one showing recent apps and the other displaying suggestions of apps you might like. The former is handy, but I removed the latter – none of the recommended apps seemed to make much sense.

Other new features include the ability to add a power button to the usual back, home and recent app buttons on the soft bar at the base of the screen. You’ll also be able to “throw” audio from the M9 to some Bluetooth speakers; I didn’t have a compatible product to test this on, though.

Elsewhere, the Sense 7 is largely the same as before. As with the M8 it allows you to wake the M9 with a double-tap, and BlinkFeed remains in place, accessible via a swipe from the left edge of the screen. This time, though, it adds location- and time-based recommendations from Yelp. These pop up on the lockscreen and your newsfeed when meal-times roll around, so you’re never short of a restaurant recommendation.

Verdict

The HTC One M9 is an improvement over the M8 in many ways. The refined design is gorgeous, and the upgrades included in Sense 7 lend it a mature feel that’s missing from rivals’ attempts to customise Android. It’s also incredibly quick, and it’s good to see that HTC has staunchly resisted the temptation to drop microSD expansion. That alone should persuade a good section of buyers to get their wallets out.

In many areas, though, the HTC One M9 feels like a modest step forward; the camera needs serious work and battery life is a serious concern. In order to command such a high price – it’s £580, and around £33 per month on free phone contracts – HTC needed to do much more with its flagship than this.

HTC One M9 vs iPhone 6

So how does the HTC One M9 compare with the ubiquitous iPhone 6? Well, aside from the radically different software and UI, the key differences between the HTC One M9 and the iPhone 6 lie in the handsets’ size.

The iPhone 6 is far slimmer and lighter than the One, but there’s not much in it when it comes to how the handsets look. I really like the new colour schemes of the One M9, and its all metal chassis is a touch more interesting to look at than the iPhone, with sweeping curves everywhere and contrasting sidewalls.

In terms of performance, the HTC One M9 streaks ahead in some areas falls behind in others and matches it elsewhere. In single-threaded tests, the iPhone 6 still wins: its SunSpider result of 347ms is way ahead of the M9’s 849ms and it scores 1,631 in Geekbench 3’s single-core tests. In Geekbench 3’s multi-core tests, it’s the HTC One M9’s turn to win, with a score of 3,677 to the iPhone’s 2,913, and the two handsets are neck-and-neck for graphics performance with framerates of 49fps for the M9 and 52 for the iPhone 6 in the GFXBench T-Rex HD (onscreen) benchmark.

Elsewhere, it’s a similarly mixed picture. The M9’s screen is a modest 0.3in larger than the iPhone’s 4.7in display, but despite a much higher pixel density of 442ppi than the iPhone’s 327ppi, you won’t notice much difference in sharpness unless you get your magnifying glass out. And the iPhone 6’s display is clearly superior in other respects as well: it’s brighter at maximum settings, more colour accurate and contrast is a little better as well.

For audio, the HTC One M9’s front-facing stereo speakers give the iPhone’s edge-mounted mono speaker a good hiding, however, and the HTC wins again for flexibility, including a microSD slot for memory expansion. The M9 also has an infrared transmitter so it can be used as a universal remote control, and there’s much more scope for customisation in the software.

The camera is the big difference between these two handsets. While the iPhone 6 lacks optical image stabilisation, and the resolution isn’t nearly as high, it takes much better photographs. Its superior autofocus system helps here, but the software is able to choose more appropriate settings more often, resulting in far fewer blurry, unusable shots.

HTC One M9 vs Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge

I haven’t fully tested the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge yet, so I can’t deliver a definitive conclusion. However, there are some aspects I can comment on, specifically the design, an area in which Samsung has significantly upped its game.

While the S5 had a plastic body, the S6 and S6 Edge benefit from a much more attractive metal and glass unibody design. It’s stunning, no two ways about it, especially in the Edge variant, and certainly more glitzy than the One M9. However, the HTC One M9’s metal body is still a beautiful thing to behold.

The HTC wins when it comes to flexibility, retaining that all-important microSD slot where the Samsung S6 and S6 Edge lose theirs. It has a larger battery, boasting 2,840mAh of capacity compared with 2,550mAh/2,600mAh in the S6/S6 Edge, but it doesn’t support wireless charging where the two Samsung devices do, and despite that smaller power pack, both Samsung devices deliver superior battery life. 

What really sets the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge apart from the HTC One M9, however, is the quality of the camera. Despite a lower resolution of 16-megapixels, the S6’s camera is vastly superior when it comes to quality, helped by a larger aperture and the inclusion of optical image stabilisation. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy S6’s camera is, and remains, the best camera I’ve seen on any smartphone. 

	HTC One M9 specifications	Samsung Galaxy S6 specifications	Samsung Galaxy S6 edge specifications
Processor	Octacore (quad 2GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC	Octacore (quad 2.1GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Samsung Exynos SoC	Octacore (quad 2.1GHz and quad 1.5GHz), Samsung Exynos SoC
RAM	3GB	3GB LPDDR4	3GB LPDDR4
Screen size	5in	5.1in	5.1in
Screen resolution	1,080 x 1,920, 441ppi (Gorilla Glass 4)	1,440 x 2560, 576ppi (Gorilla Glass 4)	1,440 x 2560, 576ppi (Gorilla Glass 4)
Screen type	Super LCD3 (IPS)	Super AMOLED	Super AMOLED
Front camera	4MP	5MP	5MP
Rear camera	20.7MP (f/2.2)	16MP (f/1.9, phase detect autofocus, OIS)	16MP (f/1.9, phase detect autofocus, OIS)
Flash	Dual LED	Dual LED	Dual LED
GPS	Yes	Yes	Yes
Compass	Yes	Yes	Yes
Storage	32GB	64/128GB (UFS 2 flash)	32/64/128GB (UFS 2 flash)
Memory card slot (supplied)	MicroSD	No	No
Wi-Fi	802.11ac	802.11ac (2x2 MIMO)	802.11ac (2x2 MIMO)
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 4.1, A2DP, apt-X	Bluetooth 4.1 LE, A2DP, apt-X, ANT+	Bluetooth 4.1 LE, A2DP, apt-X, ANT+
NFC	Yes	Yes	Yes
Wireless data	4G	4G, Cat6 (300Mbits/sec download, 50Mbits/sec upload)	4G, Cat6 (300Mbits/sec download, 50Mbits/sec upload)
Size (WDH)	70 x 9.6 x 145mm	71 x 6.8 x 143mm	70 x 7 x 142mm
Weight	157g	138g	132g
Operating system	Android 5 Lollipop with Sense 7		Android 5 Lollipop
Battery size	2,840mAh	2,550mAh	2,600mAh