Pros
- Beautifully crafted and well-designed
- Speedy processor
- Sense Home works brilliantly
- Great front-facing camera
- Best speakers you can find on a phone
Cons
- Aesthetic changes not an improvement
- Rear camera not as good as the competition
- Some software niggles
Key Features
- 20-megapixel rear camera
- 4-megapixel Ultrapixel front-facing camera
- 5-inch 1080p LCD screen
- BoomSound speakers with Dolby Surround
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, 3GB RAM
- 32GB onboard storage with microSD slot
- HTC Sense 7 on Android 5.0 Lollipop
- Manufacturer: HTC
- Review Price: £580.00
Originally reviewed on 23 March 2015
The HTC One M8 and original One were both great handsets, the latter a winner of the TrustedReviews’ Phone of the Year Award in 2013. The previous models in the One range were both arguably better than their Samsung and Apple counterparts at the time, but the competition has since caught up, and then some. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have sold a shedload and Samsung has put its flimsy-design woes to bed with the sturdier glass and metal Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.
Does the HTC One M9 live up to its predecessors? HTC has opted against a complete design-overhaul, choosing evolution rather than revolution. Design-wise it has a lot in common with the One M8 and the screen is almost identical. The majority of the hardware developments come in the way of a new camera, processor and a bigger battery, while HTC’s version of Android has had a makeover with Sense 7.
This all results in a great phone with some clear areas of improvement. However, neither the new rear camera nor the battery life live up to their respective promises. And this isn’t wholly unexpected.
Nevertheless, this is still a solid flagship and it proves how far HTC has come in the last 2 or 3 years that we hold its products to such high standards and intense levels of scrutiny.
The most immediately noticeable of these tweaks is the new two-tone design. The trio of two-tone colour schemes available from launch will see a gold on silver handset joined by gold on gold and gun metal on grey offerings.
Where the back of the One M8 curved round to the screen, the M9 has a ridge connecting the front to the rear. The front of the handset looks as though it has been shoehorned into the back, the benefit being that HTC has been able to do away with the thin plastic edge between the screen and the frame.
Do any of these changes make it better? Not in our opinion. The HTC One M8 has a classier air about it – it’s like comparing an understated Breitling to a gold Rolex. Both are well-made, but which one you’d grace on your wrist depends entirely on your taste.
This is a little harsh on the M9. It's a good-looking phone, full of slick design touches and craftsmanship – a word HTC keeps using, and with good reason – but we like the M8 more.
The one upside to the ridge is it makes the M9 easier to grip – it's less slippery than the M8 and other curved phones like the iPhone 6. It's easier to hold one-handed, too, though it's a smidgen less comfortable to hold.
In every other respect the design of the HTC One M9 is a triumph. This isn’t a thin phone, but neither does it feel porky – it’s 0.2mm thicker than the M8, but almost 1mm narrower. The back curves into your hand and the metal feels solid – more so than the previous model even though it’s a few grams lighter at 157g. That weight gives it a good heft – the One M9 is well balanced, if a little bottom heavy. It feels like you’re holding a quality phone not a toddler’s toy. We like that.
One major new design improvement is the feel and location of the volume and power buttons. Previously plastic and along the top, the power button was a struggle to reach. It’s now in a far more sensible position, on the right hand edge, just below the volume buttons. It’s also been upgraded to metal and comes with a light etch so you can tell the difference between it and the volume buttons. These have had a tweak too. The buttons are a mite firmer and feel that bit better to press.
This is a tall and narrow phone so the new button position means it’s easy to reach with your thumb, if you’re using it right handed, or with your left hand’s index or middle finger. What’s still an issue is reaching the top of the screen.
It’s a real stretch to get your thumb to the browser back button or search box. Apple has gone some way to solving the issues that come with handling a large phone by dropping the screen with a double-tap on Touch ID. Samsung has as well, to a lesser extent, with one-handed mode. HTC hasn’t addressed the problem at all. If you’ve got average or small hands, you will need to juggle the phone to reach certain areas of the screen when you’re using it one-handed.
In most other respects the HTC One M9 is what you’d expect from a flagship phone. The microUSB and 3.5mm headphone jack are at the bottom, while there’s a pair of fine grilles at the front which house the new BoomSound speakers – we’ll cover those in more detail later.
Almost the whole top edge is covered with translucent black plastic. This is there to accommodate the infrared blaster that lets you use the M9 as a TV or home cinema remote.
The only other difference between the One M9 and last year’s phone is on the back. Rather than a round camera that sits flush to the body the M9 has a square one that’s slightly raised. Rounded edges ensure the phone doesn’t snag when you’re sliding it into a tight pocket.
All in all the design changes HTC has made to the M9 are positive. The ergonomics have improved thanks to the new power button and narrower body, but some of the aesthetic alterations are less of a success. HTC could have left well enough alone, but there’s no denying that the HTC One M9 is dashingly handsome.
The M9 is available in three colours at launch: Gunmetal Grey, Gold on Silver, and Gold on Gold. Read on to find out about the HTC One M9’s screen.
HTC has steered clear of the 2K bandwagon and stuck with a 1080p (Full HD) screen for the One M9. It’s almost identical to the one sported by its predecessor, albeit with thinner bezels.
2K screens have twice the resolution of Full HD. This means that text and images are sharper. But does this make a difference on a 5-inch screen? Not enough to matter. The human eye can only see so much and you need to try very hard to spot a pixel on the HTC One M9. A pixel density of 441ppi makes it far sharper than the 326ppi Retina display on the iPhone 6, a display that’s good in its own right.
In other words, not being 2K isn't a problem. We’ll take the power savings a lower resolution screen offers over a negligible increase in sharpness.
The screen on the HTC One M9 (right) is almost identical to its predecessor
If there is an improvement we’d have liked to see made it’s a move from LCD technology to AMOLED – a screen tech that Samsung seems to have mastered. That said, HTC’s Super LCD3 display provides decent contrast and black levels. Watching a movie on the 5-inch screen looks great, with dark scenes looking deep and convincing, and you won’t notice any backlight bleed unless you whack up brightness to 100 and are viewing in a dark room.
Brightness and viewing angles are respectable, too. We kept the phone at full blast on a sunny day out in London (which does sometimes happen) and had no problems. We could see the screen well enough while checking Google Maps or reading texts, but we would like the option to go a little brighter.
More of an issue is the screen’s reflectivity. This hasn’t changed much from the HTC One M8 and means you will find yourself angling the phone to reduce glare when the sun’s out. It’s not a huge problem, and certainly not one isolated to the One M9.
The M9’s screen is great. It doesn’t match up to the LG G3 or Galaxy S6 in terms sheer pixel count, but you won’t feel short-changed. It’s just as good as the 5.5-inch 1080p display on the iPhone 6 Plus and few people complain about that one.
It’s not until you hear a decent pair of speakers on a phone that you realise quite how worthwhile they are. Watching a film with all the detail of the background music available and actors sounding like themselves is a luxury rarely had on the go.
The One M9 keeps with tradition by including front-facing stereo speakers with a built-in amp, and Dolby Audio that betters its predecessors and blows away the competition.
Related: Best Headphones 2015
The front-facing speakers offer decent stereo separation when compared to speakers on other phones. That’s not what’s most impressive, though. The HTC One M9 provides great depth and surprising mid-range detail for such a small device. It makes the speakers on the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 sound rubbish.
As you might expect with such small speakers low-end is lacking so if you like bass-heavy music your best bet is to plug in a good pair of headphones. The amp and Dolby Audio extends the 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’ll be treated to some great sound.
Top volume reaches decent levels, enough to enjoy some tracks in a bedroom or other small spaces. It's the perfect phone when you want a little music to brighten up a sunny afternoon in the park, or a late night camping.
You won’t find better speakers on any other phone.
Qualcomm’s 800-series processors dominated 2014 flagships, and with good reason. The Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Sony Xperia Z3 all packed a serious wallop and made mincemeat of intense 3D games and processor-hungry HD video conversion.
The 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 810 the One M9 totes is Qualcomm’s latest and greatest and provides twice the number of cores of the M8's 801. Twice the power, then? It doesn’t quite work that way, I’m afraid.
READ MORE: Octa-core vs Quad-core
The Snapdragon 810 uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This let’s a low-powered 1.55GHz quad-core processor be paired with another, more powerful, 1.96GHz quad-core processor on the same chipset. The benefits of this aren’t just about increasing power – last-gen quad-core processors are already powerful – it’s about energy efficiency.
Most of the common tasks your smartphone does – make calls, send texts, collect sensor data, listen to music and browse the web – don’t need much power. Using a mighty processor for these is overkill, and uses more of the battery than it should. That’s where the LITTLE quad-core comes into play. It takes care of all those smaller, daily, tasks in a more energy efficient way, thereby conserving power. It also means that HTC no longer needs the co-processor that handled all the sensor data on the M9’s predecessor.
The processor is restricted in Power Saver mode. This means that the HTC One M9 performs differently depending on how much juice you’re willing to sacrifice.
Let’s leave the benefits to the HTC One M9’s battery life to one side for a moment and focus on its performance. As you can expect the Snapdragon 810 and 3GB RAM helps the One M9 fly through common tasks like flicking through menus, opening apps and browsing the web, regardless of which quad is being used.
We tested the HTC One M9 with some of the most demanding games on Google Play.
Intense 3D racers like Asphalt and Real Racing 3 run like a dream – we didn’t experience a single frame drop, unlike the One M8 where we have had a few. A couple of frames were dropped during Riptide 2, but not enough to affect the experience negatively.
One thing we did note is that the back of the One M9 gets toasty after a prolonged gaming session, something that’s made worse by charging the phone at the same time. The good thing is that no matter how long we played we never got an overheating warning message, something that happened several times while we were reviewing the Snapdragon 810-packing LG G Flex 2.
We won’t compare these figures to the One M8, which 3DMark banned for gaming the system. HTC’s previous flagship would optimise processor performance when it recognised a benchmark was being run, but we have no reason to suspect the One M9 of this. The benchmark scores match what we expect to see from a phone using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chipset.
What we’ve done instead is compare the One M9 to the Samsung Galaxy S5 – a phone with a similar Snapdragon 801 processor to the M8. HTC’s latest phone is around 20-25% faster than the Galaxy S5. We’ve not benchmarked the Galaxy S6 but leaked results look like its octa-core Exynos processor is even speedier than the Snapdragon 810.
HTC’s Android layer is one of the least offensive around, in fact we’d go as far to say that we rather like it. That’s because it’s simple to use and doesn’t seem to impact the M9’s performance much at all, although we did experience some usability issues. These might have more to do with Android Lollipop, which still has a few kinks that need ironing out. For example, we found that, on occasion, we couldn’t swipe down to access the notification centre or quick settings. A restart resolved the issue, but it was annoying nonetheless.
A more fundamental problem was an issue that occurred about once a day where the phone would lose network signal entirely. This isn’t something that’s isolated to the One M9 – we’ve experienced the same on the iPhone 6, Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 – but on other phones popping in and out of Airplane Mode would resolve the issue. Not so on the M9. Once again a restart was required.
These are all issues that we expect to be fixed with software updates. Let’s take a closer look at the new features Sense 7 brings to the HTC One M9.
The best new feature on Sense 7 is Sense Home. When we first heard about it we thought it could be more of an irritant than a help. Why would you want the core apps you keep on your homepage changing? Your homepage is your bastion – a place you put all your most important apps. In practice, though, Sense Home works brilliantly.
The Home widget adapts the eight main apps (or app folders) on your homescreen depending on where you are. At home? You’ll might want the Remote app, Netflix and Spotify front and centre, while when you’re at work the calendar and email may be more useful. The third location is simply called Out and promotes Google Maps and other helpful travel apps.
Home learns your habits and rearranges the apps appropriately, although you can also pin apps you find vital. What makes it particularly helpful are two app folders that provide homepage access to your last downloaded apps and app suggestions for your location. Forget hunting through pages of apps or using search – HTC’s Sense Home is a mind-reader that surfaces what you need when you need it.
Sense 7: ThemesTheme’s
lets you customise the M9 from the lock screen all the way to the
fonts. A few themes are preloaded, while others can be downloaded. Where
it gets interesting is that any picture can be used to construct a
theme. Have a favourite photo you want to use as a lock screen? Themes
analyses it and picks appropriate colours, icons and fonts to create a
look that spans the whole phone.
It does a great job of picking appropriate colours, but some of the icon styles miss the mark. Several are so abstract that you’re left scratching your head whether you’re about to open the camera app or send an email, while other’s crop third-party icons, like Chrome or Facebook so they look wrong. Still, it’s a slick process to create a theme and tinkering with it to get acceptable results is just as simple. If you love customising your phone then HTC has made it dead easy.
Sense 7: Cloudex
Cloudex is a new app that comes with Sense 7 on the HTC One M9. It aggregates photos you’ve stored online on Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook or Flickr and creates a thumbnail gallery for you.
Sense 7: HTC Connect Three Finger Swipe
HTC Connect lets you easily throw content to DLNA compatible devices using a three fingered swipe up on the screen. We’ve seen it working during a demonstration but try as we might we couldn’t get the One M9 to see our Raumfeld One S wireless speaker or Chromecast.
There are a number of other apps that make a return on the HTC One M9. They’re oldies but goodies.
Peel Smart RemoteThis
smart remote app is one of the best around and makes the HTC One M9 a
powerful smart remote that lets you control everything from a TV to your
sound system and set-top box using the infrared blaster on the top of
the phone. It includes channel guides so you can easily plan your
viewing.
Kid Mode
As the name suggests, Kid Mode (made by Zoodles) lets you lock your phone down for young children to use. You can select apps that can only be used within the simple Kid Mode interface, while there are plenty of child-friendly videos and games included to keep young’uns occupied.
HTC Music App
As well as the Google Play Music app you also get HTC’s own Music App. This isn’t a case of overkill – Google’s app has become all about buying into its streaming service, whereas HTC’s lets you listen to music stored locally on your phone or on media servers like your home PC.
Aside from that you get the usual dual-band Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac) with Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA support, MHL 3.0 for connecting to a TV via cable, and 4G. You also get the newest Bluetooth 4.1 standard for low-power pairing with other devices like Bluetooth speakers. We’ve already mentioned the included IR blaster that lets you control your TV, but there’s also a radio that can be used when you plug in the in-ear headphones that come in the box.
The M9's camera has a 20.7-megapixel sensor, which sounds great in principle – the iPhone 6 only has 8. Megapixels aren't the be all and end all of a camera, though. Far from it. One disappointing aspect of the One M9 camera's specs is that there's no optical image stabilisation. This helps low-light photography and comes as standard on the iPhone 6 Plus, Nexus 6 and upcoming Galaxy S6.
But first let’s have a look at the camera app, which is busting to the brim with features. It comes with the usual front, rear and panorama settings, but you also get photo booth, split capture and Bokeh. Photo booth and split capture are simple. The first takes four pictures in quick succession and creates a grid, while split camera takes a picture with the front and rear camera at the same time (or with a short delay if you want to set a selfie up).
Bokeh – the photographic effect where an object is in focus and the background is out of focus – is more interesting. It attempts to emulate the HTC One M8’s shallow-depth-of-field-effect Duo camera, but using software alone. Let’s see how well it works.
As you can see from the above image the daffodil is in focus while objects behind it or to the side are slightly blurred. This should be a gradual effect, however in this photo it’s rather jarring – one moment it’s in focus and the next it’s out of focus. You also have to be within 60cm of the object you want to apply the effect and it takes 5 seconds to process the image. All in all this is one setting best avoided.
There’s a few other tweaks that the camera app lets you apply to photos. The fx Editor comes with the usual host of filters and frames, effects and touch ups so you can give yourself those killer cheekbones you’ve always craved.
Then there’s Double Exposure that lets you blend two photos together, while Elements adds movement to your photos like leaves falling from trees or bubbles being blown around. Finally, HTC Zoe creates fun little videos from a selection of photos.
All these features are great to have but are only as good as the camera that takes the photo in the first place. Let’s dive into the HTC One M9’s camera performance and how it compares to its rivals.
Our first comparison shot is of a stone statue. You’d expect the One M9 to show more detail than both the lower megapixel Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 Plus. In reality, however, detail is limited with objects in the background appearing soft and fuzzy. The stone head doesn’t pop with the same colours of its competitors either.
Exposure metering seems to be one of the core issues. Sources of light cause the HTC One M9 to struggle with balancing brightness leading to a loss of detail and dark surroundings. We took several challenging photos of the sunny river Thames. Without changing any settings each photo came out quite different – lack of consistency is one of the biggest problems of the One M9’s rear camera.
HTC One M9 on the left, Galaxy S5 on the right
The HTC One M9's rear camera doesn't excel in low-light either. It's a little better than the Galaxy S5 but not on par with the iPhone 6 Plus and the helping hand it gets from optical image stabilisation.
The HTC One M9 camera struggles in low-light too
When it all goes right, though, photos can look fantastic. A vibrant shot of a flowery piano below brought out the best in the One M9’s camera. In terms of colour accuracy the M9 outshone its main rivals although some of the detail was crushed compared to the S5.
HDR mode also works well and improves the colour and light balance of a photo. Like the Bokeh effect this takes longer than we’d like to process – around two seconds.
HDR off on the left and on on the right half of the image
Still, over the course of several dozen comparative shots, we’d take the Galaxy S5’s rear camera over the one on the HTC One M9. That phone is a year old now and experience tells us that the Galaxy S6 should be even better. HTC hasn’t done quite enough to catch up to the competition here, but neither are the flaws in its camera fatal.
If you liked the 4-megapixel Ultrapixel camera on the rear of the HTC One M8 you'll be pleased to know that it makes an appearance on the One M9, but this time it's on the front. It makes a lot more sense to have this type of camera for selfie – they're often taken in the dingy-light conditions of bars and restaurants.
Front-facing camera low-light shot comparison under the same conditions as before
When it comes to front facing cameras the One M9 does a much better job than both the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 Plus. If you take more selfies than landscape shots you’ll love this camera.
The HTC One M9 can shoot 4K video – up to six minutes of it. It also has a 120fps slow-motion mode. Video quality is adequate, but suffers from the same issues we’d experienced with the camera, namely iffy exposure metering.
With those specs, and using what is essentially the same screen, you’d bet money that the One M9 would significantly outlast its predecessor. But in both our general day-to-day tests and video playback benchmark they came out on almost equal footing.
Let’s start with our video test where we play a standard definition video at around 50% brightness until the battery runs out. Here the HTC One M9 managed 10 hours – just a few minutes more than the M8 but less than the Galaxy S5 or iPhone 6 Plus. This plays out in the GeekBench 3 battery test where the M9 scores 2,072 (3 hours 43 minutes), the S5 a 2,731 (4 hours 43 minutes) and the iPhone 6 Plus a whopping 3,155 (5 hours 15 minutes). This test hammers the processor and with power saver on the One M9 kept going and going. We got bored when it passed the 5 hour mark and the battery was still at 50%. All this points to the big quad-core processor being a bit of a power hog.
More typical use also showed the the One M9’s battery life is good, but not outstanding. A day of heavy use including an hour of satellite navigation, three hours of browsing the web (3G and 4G), an hour of video and two hours of 3D gaming (among some other general use) drained the battery to 0% in 13 hours.
The HTC One M9's battery life during a hard day of use
That was a very heavy day’s use, however. Using the One M9 normally you will be left with around 50% battery life by bedtime. If you don’t play many 3D games you can choose to keep the power saver setting on all the time. This impacts performance, as we saw earlier, but not in any significant way and you will extend your battery life by some margin. In fact you may not notice any problems playing games either.
If you’re really struggling for power and you need to make the M9 last then there’s the option of Extreme Power Saving mode. This cripples the functionality of the phone to the core basics – texts and calls.
Like most flagship phones these days the HTC One M9 does not come with a removable battery. That means if you need power on the go your best bet is to carry a battery pack with you.
One battery boon the One M9 does come with, like the Galaxy S6, is fast battery charging. HTC claims this gives you 60% of your battery from just a 30-minute charging blast. In our test we managed 30% from half an hour charge. You need a special cable to take advantage of fast charging and, annoyingly, this isn't included in the box. It takes the M9 one and a half hours to recharge fully suing the standard, supplied, cable – that’s almost half an hour faster than the iPhone 6.
The HTC One M9 just about outlasts its predecessor, especially when using power saving mode, and certainly outlasts the iPhone 6, but not the Galaxy S5 or iPhone 6 Plus. If battery life is a key factor in deciding which smartphone to buy then you won’t be too disappointed by the M9, but there are a couple of other phones that will go for a little bit longer.
If you're after an upgrade from your original HTC One or HTC One M8 then the M9 won't disappoint you. The rear camera isn't perfect but it is better than the camera on it's predecessors, and you get the added benefit of having the M8's rear camera on the front.
If you're picking between the M9 and other, current flagships then there's a few things you should consider. It has better battery life and front-facing camera than the iPhone 6 and is just as well made. How it will quite stack up to the more expensive Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, due out soon, remains to be seen – you may want to wait too.
There are a few other options worthy of consideration, though. Last year’s TrustedReviews Award-winning LG G3 has a better camera and can now be bought for around half the price of the One M9 – although HTC’s software and build-quality are superior. Then there’s the excellent Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – a fantastic and well-made phone that can be found for £500/$800. It should be noted that neither of these options is as compact as the One M9.
What is the HTC One M9?
Taking up the mantle as HTC’s flagship phone in 2015, the HTC One M9 has a lot to live up to.The HTC One M8 and original One were both great handsets, the latter a winner of the TrustedReviews’ Phone of the Year Award in 2013. The previous models in the One range were both arguably better than their Samsung and Apple counterparts at the time, but the competition has since caught up, and then some. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have sold a shedload and Samsung has put its flimsy-design woes to bed with the sturdier glass and metal Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.
Does the HTC One M9 live up to its predecessors? HTC has opted against a complete design-overhaul, choosing evolution rather than revolution. Design-wise it has a lot in common with the One M8 and the screen is almost identical. The majority of the hardware developments come in the way of a new camera, processor and a bigger battery, while HTC’s version of Android has had a makeover with Sense 7.
This all results in a great phone with some clear areas of improvement. However, neither the new rear camera nor the battery life live up to their respective promises. And this isn’t wholly unexpected.
Nevertheless, this is still a solid flagship and it proves how far HTC has come in the last 2 or 3 years that we hold its products to such high standards and intense levels of scrutiny.
HTC One M9: Design
The HTC One M9 is to the One M8 what the iPhone 5S is to the iPhone 5. It shares the same basic design and screen as the HTC One M8 but some small adjustments set it apart from last year’s handset.The most immediately noticeable of these tweaks is the new two-tone design. The trio of two-tone colour schemes available from launch will see a gold on silver handset joined by gold on gold and gun metal on grey offerings.
Where the back of the One M8 curved round to the screen, the M9 has a ridge connecting the front to the rear. The front of the handset looks as though it has been shoehorned into the back, the benefit being that HTC has been able to do away with the thin plastic edge between the screen and the frame.
Do any of these changes make it better? Not in our opinion. The HTC One M8 has a classier air about it – it’s like comparing an understated Breitling to a gold Rolex. Both are well-made, but which one you’d grace on your wrist depends entirely on your taste.
This is a little harsh on the M9. It's a good-looking phone, full of slick design touches and craftsmanship – a word HTC keeps using, and with good reason – but we like the M8 more.
The one upside to the ridge is it makes the M9 easier to grip – it's less slippery than the M8 and other curved phones like the iPhone 6. It's easier to hold one-handed, too, though it's a smidgen less comfortable to hold.
In every other respect the design of the HTC One M9 is a triumph. This isn’t a thin phone, but neither does it feel porky – it’s 0.2mm thicker than the M8, but almost 1mm narrower. The back curves into your hand and the metal feels solid – more so than the previous model even though it’s a few grams lighter at 157g. That weight gives it a good heft – the One M9 is well balanced, if a little bottom heavy. It feels like you’re holding a quality phone not a toddler’s toy. We like that.
One major new design improvement is the feel and location of the volume and power buttons. Previously plastic and along the top, the power button was a struggle to reach. It’s now in a far more sensible position, on the right hand edge, just below the volume buttons. It’s also been upgraded to metal and comes with a light etch so you can tell the difference between it and the volume buttons. These have had a tweak too. The buttons are a mite firmer and feel that bit better to press.
This is a tall and narrow phone so the new button position means it’s easy to reach with your thumb, if you’re using it right handed, or with your left hand’s index or middle finger. What’s still an issue is reaching the top of the screen.
It’s a real stretch to get your thumb to the browser back button or search box. Apple has gone some way to solving the issues that come with handling a large phone by dropping the screen with a double-tap on Touch ID. Samsung has as well, to a lesser extent, with one-handed mode. HTC hasn’t addressed the problem at all. If you’ve got average or small hands, you will need to juggle the phone to reach certain areas of the screen when you’re using it one-handed.
In most other respects the HTC One M9 is what you’d expect from a flagship phone. The microUSB and 3.5mm headphone jack are at the bottom, while there’s a pair of fine grilles at the front which house the new BoomSound speakers – we’ll cover those in more detail later.
Almost the whole top edge is covered with translucent black plastic. This is there to accommodate the infrared blaster that lets you use the M9 as a TV or home cinema remote.
The only other difference between the One M9 and last year’s phone is on the back. Rather than a round camera that sits flush to the body the M9 has a square one that’s slightly raised. Rounded edges ensure the phone doesn’t snag when you’re sliding it into a tight pocket.
All in all the design changes HTC has made to the M9 are positive. The ergonomics have improved thanks to the new power button and narrower body, but some of the aesthetic alterations are less of a success. HTC could have left well enough alone, but there’s no denying that the HTC One M9 is dashingly handsome.
The M9 is available in three colours at launch: Gunmetal Grey, Gold on Silver, and Gold on Gold. Read on to find out about the HTC One M9’s screen.
HTC One M9: Screen
1,920 x 1,080; Super LCD 3; Corning Gorilla Glass 4HTC has steered clear of the 2K bandwagon and stuck with a 1080p (Full HD) screen for the One M9. It’s almost identical to the one sported by its predecessor, albeit with thinner bezels.
2K screens have twice the resolution of Full HD. This means that text and images are sharper. But does this make a difference on a 5-inch screen? Not enough to matter. The human eye can only see so much and you need to try very hard to spot a pixel on the HTC One M9. A pixel density of 441ppi makes it far sharper than the 326ppi Retina display on the iPhone 6, a display that’s good in its own right.
In other words, not being 2K isn't a problem. We’ll take the power savings a lower resolution screen offers over a negligible increase in sharpness.
The screen on the HTC One M9 (right) is almost identical to its predecessor
If there is an improvement we’d have liked to see made it’s a move from LCD technology to AMOLED – a screen tech that Samsung seems to have mastered. That said, HTC’s Super LCD3 display provides decent contrast and black levels. Watching a movie on the 5-inch screen looks great, with dark scenes looking deep and convincing, and you won’t notice any backlight bleed unless you whack up brightness to 100 and are viewing in a dark room.
Brightness and viewing angles are respectable, too. We kept the phone at full blast on a sunny day out in London (which does sometimes happen) and had no problems. We could see the screen well enough while checking Google Maps or reading texts, but we would like the option to go a little brighter.
More of an issue is the screen’s reflectivity. This hasn’t changed much from the HTC One M8 and means you will find yourself angling the phone to reduce glare when the sun’s out. It’s not a huge problem, and certainly not one isolated to the One M9.
The M9’s screen is great. It doesn’t match up to the LG G3 or Galaxy S6 in terms sheer pixel count, but you won’t feel short-changed. It’s just as good as the 5.5-inch 1080p display on the iPhone 6 Plus and few people complain about that one.
HTC One M9: Speakers and sound quality
Front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers with Dolby AudioIt’s not until you hear a decent pair of speakers on a phone that you realise quite how worthwhile they are. Watching a film with all the detail of the background music available and actors sounding like themselves is a luxury rarely had on the go.
The One M9 keeps with tradition by including front-facing stereo speakers with a built-in amp, and Dolby Audio that betters its predecessors and blows away the competition.
Related: Best Headphones 2015
The front-facing speakers offer decent stereo separation when compared to speakers on other phones. That’s not what’s most impressive, though. The HTC One M9 provides great depth and surprising mid-range detail for such a small device. It makes the speakers on the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 sound rubbish.
As you might expect with such small speakers low-end is lacking so if you like bass-heavy music your best bet is to plug in a good pair of headphones. The amp and Dolby Audio extends the 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’ll be treated to some great sound.
Top volume reaches decent levels, enough to enjoy some tracks in a bedroom or other small spaces. It's the perfect phone when you want a little music to brighten up a sunny afternoon in the park, or a late night camping.
You won’t find better speakers on any other phone.
HTC One M9: Performance
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core; 3GB RAMQualcomm’s 800-series processors dominated 2014 flagships, and with good reason. The Galaxy S5, HTC One M8 and Sony Xperia Z3 all packed a serious wallop and made mincemeat of intense 3D games and processor-hungry HD video conversion.
The 64-bit octa-core Snapdragon 810 the One M9 totes is Qualcomm’s latest and greatest and provides twice the number of cores of the M8's 801. Twice the power, then? It doesn’t quite work that way, I’m afraid.
READ MORE: Octa-core vs Quad-core
The Snapdragon 810 uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. This let’s a low-powered 1.55GHz quad-core processor be paired with another, more powerful, 1.96GHz quad-core processor on the same chipset. The benefits of this aren’t just about increasing power – last-gen quad-core processors are already powerful – it’s about energy efficiency.
Most of the common tasks your smartphone does – make calls, send texts, collect sensor data, listen to music and browse the web – don’t need much power. Using a mighty processor for these is overkill, and uses more of the battery than it should. That’s where the LITTLE quad-core comes into play. It takes care of all those smaller, daily, tasks in a more energy efficient way, thereby conserving power. It also means that HTC no longer needs the co-processor that handled all the sensor data on the M9’s predecessor.
The processor is restricted in Power Saver mode. This means that the HTC One M9 performs differently depending on how much juice you’re willing to sacrifice.
Let’s leave the benefits to the HTC One M9’s battery life to one side for a moment and focus on its performance. As you can expect the Snapdragon 810 and 3GB RAM helps the One M9 fly through common tasks like flicking through menus, opening apps and browsing the web, regardless of which quad is being used.
HTC One M9: Gaming
What about gaming performance, though. Can that big processor and Adreno 430 GPU shift polygons at speed?We tested the HTC One M9 with some of the most demanding games on Google Play.
Intense 3D racers like Asphalt and Real Racing 3 run like a dream – we didn’t experience a single frame drop, unlike the One M8 where we have had a few. A couple of frames were dropped during Riptide 2, but not enough to affect the experience negatively.
One thing we did note is that the back of the One M9 gets toasty after a prolonged gaming session, something that’s made worse by charging the phone at the same time. The good thing is that no matter how long we played we never got an overheating warning message, something that happened several times while we were reviewing the Snapdragon 810-packing LG G Flex 2.
HTC One M9: Benchmarks
Now to the numbers. We ran our usual gamut of benchmarks and came up with some interesting results. With Power Saver turned on the One M9 scores 15,602 in 3DMark’s Ice Storm Unlimited, but this jumps to 21,625 with Power Saver turned off. It’s a similar story with GeekBench 3. Here the multi-core scores comes out to 2,268 and 3,545 respectively, while the results are a lot closer on Epic Citadel with Power Saver coming in just two frames per second below full power’s 59.5fps.We won’t compare these figures to the One M8, which 3DMark banned for gaming the system. HTC’s previous flagship would optimise processor performance when it recognised a benchmark was being run, but we have no reason to suspect the One M9 of this. The benchmark scores match what we expect to see from a phone using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 chipset.
What we’ve done instead is compare the One M9 to the Samsung Galaxy S5 – a phone with a similar Snapdragon 801 processor to the M8. HTC’s latest phone is around 20-25% faster than the Galaxy S5. We’ve not benchmarked the Galaxy S6 but leaked results look like its octa-core Exynos processor is even speedier than the Snapdragon 810.
HTC One M9: Sense 7 and Android 5.0 Lollipop
Google’s latest mobile operating system, Android Lollipop, graces the One M9, but it is customised via HTC Sense 7.HTC’s Android layer is one of the least offensive around, in fact we’d go as far to say that we rather like it. That’s because it’s simple to use and doesn’t seem to impact the M9’s performance much at all, although we did experience some usability issues. These might have more to do with Android Lollipop, which still has a few kinks that need ironing out. For example, we found that, on occasion, we couldn’t swipe down to access the notification centre or quick settings. A restart resolved the issue, but it was annoying nonetheless.
A more fundamental problem was an issue that occurred about once a day where the phone would lose network signal entirely. This isn’t something that’s isolated to the One M9 – we’ve experienced the same on the iPhone 6, Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 – but on other phones popping in and out of Airplane Mode would resolve the issue. Not so on the M9. Once again a restart was required.
These are all issues that we expect to be fixed with software updates. Let’s take a closer look at the new features Sense 7 brings to the HTC One M9.
HTC One M9: Apps
Sense 7: Sense HomeThe best new feature on Sense 7 is Sense Home. When we first heard about it we thought it could be more of an irritant than a help. Why would you want the core apps you keep on your homepage changing? Your homepage is your bastion – a place you put all your most important apps. In practice, though, Sense Home works brilliantly.
The Home widget adapts the eight main apps (or app folders) on your homescreen depending on where you are. At home? You’ll might want the Remote app, Netflix and Spotify front and centre, while when you’re at work the calendar and email may be more useful. The third location is simply called Out and promotes Google Maps and other helpful travel apps.
Home learns your habits and rearranges the apps appropriately, although you can also pin apps you find vital. What makes it particularly helpful are two app folders that provide homepage access to your last downloaded apps and app suggestions for your location. Forget hunting through pages of apps or using search – HTC’s Sense Home is a mind-reader that surfaces what you need when you need it.
Sense 7: ThemesTheme’s
lets you customise the M9 from the lock screen all the way to the
fonts. A few themes are preloaded, while others can be downloaded. Where
it gets interesting is that any picture can be used to construct a
theme. Have a favourite photo you want to use as a lock screen? Themes
analyses it and picks appropriate colours, icons and fonts to create a
look that spans the whole phone.It does a great job of picking appropriate colours, but some of the icon styles miss the mark. Several are so abstract that you’re left scratching your head whether you’re about to open the camera app or send an email, while other’s crop third-party icons, like Chrome or Facebook so they look wrong. Still, it’s a slick process to create a theme and tinkering with it to get acceptable results is just as simple. If you love customising your phone then HTC has made it dead easy.
Sense 7: Cloudex
Cloudex is a new app that comes with Sense 7 on the HTC One M9. It aggregates photos you’ve stored online on Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook or Flickr and creates a thumbnail gallery for you.
Sense 7: HTC Connect Three Finger Swipe
HTC Connect lets you easily throw content to DLNA compatible devices using a three fingered swipe up on the screen. We’ve seen it working during a demonstration but try as we might we couldn’t get the One M9 to see our Raumfeld One S wireless speaker or Chromecast.
There are a number of other apps that make a return on the HTC One M9. They’re oldies but goodies.
Peel Smart RemoteThis
smart remote app is one of the best around and makes the HTC One M9 a
powerful smart remote that lets you control everything from a TV to your
sound system and set-top box using the infrared blaster on the top of
the phone. It includes channel guides so you can easily plan your
viewing.Kid Mode
As the name suggests, Kid Mode (made by Zoodles) lets you lock your phone down for young children to use. You can select apps that can only be used within the simple Kid Mode interface, while there are plenty of child-friendly videos and games included to keep young’uns occupied.
HTC Music App
As well as the Google Play Music app you also get HTC’s own Music App. This isn’t a case of overkill – Google’s app has become all about buying into its streaming service, whereas HTC’s lets you listen to music stored locally on your phone or on media servers like your home PC.
HTC One M9: Connectivity
Unlike Apple and, surprisingly, Samsung and its Galaxy S6, HTC has stuck to its guns and provided a microSD card slot to complement the 32GB of onboard storage. It’s a great feature to have if you enjoy travelling with lots of movies or music. If you do like using the cloud then the One M9 also comes with 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years.Aside from that you get the usual dual-band Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac) with Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA support, MHL 3.0 for connecting to a TV via cable, and 4G. You also get the newest Bluetooth 4.1 standard for low-power pairing with other devices like Bluetooth speakers. We’ve already mentioned the included IR blaster that lets you control your TV, but there’s also a radio that can be used when you plug in the in-ear headphones that come in the box.
HTC One M9: Camera
Now down to the cameras, an area HTC has never got quite right on its One range. Has it got it right on the One M9? Not quite – results are too inconsistent – but they’re still better than ever before.The M9's camera has a 20.7-megapixel sensor, which sounds great in principle – the iPhone 6 only has 8. Megapixels aren't the be all and end all of a camera, though. Far from it. One disappointing aspect of the One M9 camera's specs is that there's no optical image stabilisation. This helps low-light photography and comes as standard on the iPhone 6 Plus, Nexus 6 and upcoming Galaxy S6.
But first let’s have a look at the camera app, which is busting to the brim with features. It comes with the usual front, rear and panorama settings, but you also get photo booth, split capture and Bokeh. Photo booth and split capture are simple. The first takes four pictures in quick succession and creates a grid, while split camera takes a picture with the front and rear camera at the same time (or with a short delay if you want to set a selfie up).
Bokeh – the photographic effect where an object is in focus and the background is out of focus – is more interesting. It attempts to emulate the HTC One M8’s shallow-depth-of-field-effect Duo camera, but using software alone. Let’s see how well it works.
As you can see from the above image the daffodil is in focus while objects behind it or to the side are slightly blurred. This should be a gradual effect, however in this photo it’s rather jarring – one moment it’s in focus and the next it’s out of focus. You also have to be within 60cm of the object you want to apply the effect and it takes 5 seconds to process the image. All in all this is one setting best avoided.
There’s a few other tweaks that the camera app lets you apply to photos. The fx Editor comes with the usual host of filters and frames, effects and touch ups so you can give yourself those killer cheekbones you’ve always craved.
Then there’s Double Exposure that lets you blend two photos together, while Elements adds movement to your photos like leaves falling from trees or bubbles being blown around. Finally, HTC Zoe creates fun little videos from a selection of photos.
All these features are great to have but are only as good as the camera that takes the photo in the first place. Let’s dive into the HTC One M9’s camera performance and how it compares to its rivals.
Our first comparison shot is of a stone statue. You’d expect the One M9 to show more detail than both the lower megapixel Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 Plus. In reality, however, detail is limited with objects in the background appearing soft and fuzzy. The stone head doesn’t pop with the same colours of its competitors either.
Exposure metering seems to be one of the core issues. Sources of light cause the HTC One M9 to struggle with balancing brightness leading to a loss of detail and dark surroundings. We took several challenging photos of the sunny river Thames. Without changing any settings each photo came out quite different – lack of consistency is one of the biggest problems of the One M9’s rear camera.
HTC One M9 on the left, Galaxy S5 on the right
The HTC One M9's rear camera doesn't excel in low-light either. It's a little better than the Galaxy S5 but not on par with the iPhone 6 Plus and the helping hand it gets from optical image stabilisation.
The HTC One M9 camera struggles in low-light too
When it all goes right, though, photos can look fantastic. A vibrant shot of a flowery piano below brought out the best in the One M9’s camera. In terms of colour accuracy the M9 outshone its main rivals although some of the detail was crushed compared to the S5.
HDR mode also works well and improves the colour and light balance of a photo. Like the Bokeh effect this takes longer than we’d like to process – around two seconds.
HDR off on the left and on on the right half of the image
Still, over the course of several dozen comparative shots, we’d take the Galaxy S5’s rear camera over the one on the HTC One M9. That phone is a year old now and experience tells us that the Galaxy S6 should be even better. HTC hasn’t done quite enough to catch up to the competition here, but neither are the flaws in its camera fatal.
If you liked the 4-megapixel Ultrapixel camera on the rear of the HTC One M8 you'll be pleased to know that it makes an appearance on the One M9, but this time it's on the front. It makes a lot more sense to have this type of camera for selfie – they're often taken in the dingy-light conditions of bars and restaurants.
Front-facing camera low-light shot comparison under the same conditions as before
When it comes to front facing cameras the One M9 does a much better job than both the Galaxy S5 and iPhone 6 Plus. If you take more selfies than landscape shots you’ll love this camera.
The HTC One M9 can shoot 4K video – up to six minutes of it. It also has a 120fps slow-motion mode. Video quality is adequate, but suffers from the same issues we’d experienced with the camera, namely iffy exposure metering.
HTC One M9: Battery Life
The HTC One M8 has solid battery life and the One M9 should, logically, better it. Qualcomm claims the big.LITTLE Snapdragon 810 is more energy efficient than the 801 on the M8 and the One M9 also comes with a larger battery – 2,840mAh vs 2,600mAh.With those specs, and using what is essentially the same screen, you’d bet money that the One M9 would significantly outlast its predecessor. But in both our general day-to-day tests and video playback benchmark they came out on almost equal footing.
Let’s start with our video test where we play a standard definition video at around 50% brightness until the battery runs out. Here the HTC One M9 managed 10 hours – just a few minutes more than the M8 but less than the Galaxy S5 or iPhone 6 Plus. This plays out in the GeekBench 3 battery test where the M9 scores 2,072 (3 hours 43 minutes), the S5 a 2,731 (4 hours 43 minutes) and the iPhone 6 Plus a whopping 3,155 (5 hours 15 minutes). This test hammers the processor and with power saver on the One M9 kept going and going. We got bored when it passed the 5 hour mark and the battery was still at 50%. All this points to the big quad-core processor being a bit of a power hog.
More typical use also showed the the One M9’s battery life is good, but not outstanding. A day of heavy use including an hour of satellite navigation, three hours of browsing the web (3G and 4G), an hour of video and two hours of 3D gaming (among some other general use) drained the battery to 0% in 13 hours.
The HTC One M9's battery life during a hard day of use
That was a very heavy day’s use, however. Using the One M9 normally you will be left with around 50% battery life by bedtime. If you don’t play many 3D games you can choose to keep the power saver setting on all the time. This impacts performance, as we saw earlier, but not in any significant way and you will extend your battery life by some margin. In fact you may not notice any problems playing games either.
If you’re really struggling for power and you need to make the M9 last then there’s the option of Extreme Power Saving mode. This cripples the functionality of the phone to the core basics – texts and calls.
Like most flagship phones these days the HTC One M9 does not come with a removable battery. That means if you need power on the go your best bet is to carry a battery pack with you.
One battery boon the One M9 does come with, like the Galaxy S6, is fast battery charging. HTC claims this gives you 60% of your battery from just a 30-minute charging blast. In our test we managed 30% from half an hour charge. You need a special cable to take advantage of fast charging and, annoyingly, this isn't included in the box. It takes the M9 one and a half hours to recharge fully suing the standard, supplied, cable – that’s almost half an hour faster than the iPhone 6.
The HTC One M9 just about outlasts its predecessor, especially when using power saving mode, and certainly outlasts the iPhone 6, but not the Galaxy S5 or iPhone 6 Plus. If battery life is a key factor in deciding which smartphone to buy then you won’t be too disappointed by the M9, but there are a couple of other phones that will go for a little bit longer.
HTC One M9: Call Quality
Active noise cancellation using a dedicated mic ensures call quality using the HTC One M9 is crisp and clear. We tested it on a noisy train and windy London streets and the recordings were excellent. Background noise can be heard, but it didn’t interfere with hearing what is being said at all.Should I buy the HTC One M9?
At £580/$859 (or £37.50 a month with no upfront cost on a 24-month contract from Carphone Warehouse) the HTC One M9 comes at a premium. If you’re looking for a flagship phone, however, then it’s not priced badly, especially when you consider that adding extra storage via microSD is cheap.If you're after an upgrade from your original HTC One or HTC One M8 then the M9 won't disappoint you. The rear camera isn't perfect but it is better than the camera on it's predecessors, and you get the added benefit of having the M8's rear camera on the front.
If you're picking between the M9 and other, current flagships then there's a few things you should consider. It has better battery life and front-facing camera than the iPhone 6 and is just as well made. How it will quite stack up to the more expensive Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, due out soon, remains to be seen – you may want to wait too.
There are a few other options worthy of consideration, though. Last year’s TrustedReviews Award-winning LG G3 has a better camera and can now be bought for around half the price of the One M9 – although HTC’s software and build-quality are superior. Then there’s the excellent Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – a fantastic and well-made phone that can be found for £500/$800. It should be noted that neither of these options is as compact as the One M9.