The HTC One M9 came
out about three months ago, so I'm way overdue for this review.
Hopefully my extended experience with the device will make this review far more useful than your average "hands-on", and mean I don't have to come back with any more updates.
On the Outside
The One M9 is a
nice-looking phone. Really nice. It is, in my opinion, the best
looking flagship out there right now. The photos of the different
variants had me hunt down the grey variant specifically, but after
denting it and getting it replaced with the silver and gold variant
(my experience you can read more about here), I can
safely say that of the two variants, the silver and gold is much,
much nicer.
Which makes it so
much more of a shame that the case I bought for the phone is so ugly.
But at least I know the case will hold tight to my phone when I need
it the most. The dual-body design of the phone creates a sort of lip
for the case to hold onto. In order to verify for this review that
the case would actually come off, I had to pry it off with a library
card. Rest assured that if you buy a case, it's not just going to
create more pieces for you to pick up after you drop the phone. If
you do decide to go caseless, however, be sure to carry a rabbit's
foot or something on your person, because if the phone lands in just
the right spot, that lip is going to dent like it's made of butter.
The dent in my M9 caused the screen to come loose from the enclosure,
and it wouldn't pop back in as easily as it popped out.
My non-premium (and
hopefully theft-deterring) case matches well with the very
non-premium pocket extensions I made to my jeans in order to
accommodate the phone. It's really big. HTC appears to have dedicated
an extra 9mm of bezel on the bottom of the phone to accommodate a
logo on the front. If they insist on having a logo on the front (in
addition to the one on the back), I'd rather they print it on the
bottom speaker grill and cut out all that extra bezel. Even if it
means 1mm of extra thickness, the phone will still fit far better in
my pocket.
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| I wasn't kidding about those pocket extensions. |
The M9 feels
fantastic in the hands, with or without a case. It's quite grippy,
but if you have quite dry hands, you risk it sliding right out.
The buttons all on
one side are a welcome feature--especially from a phone where I
regularly turned off the screen when trying to turn up the volume--I
just wish it were easier to tell them apart without looking. Maybe
the SD card slot--an excellent inclusion, and a deal-breaker for
many--could have been moved elsewhere to allow the volume buttons to
be moved further up the phone.
The notification
light is a nice feature, but not as well implemented as it could have
been. It's hidden in a hole in the speaker grill, meaning you need to
look at the phone at the right angle (or in the dark) to see it.
There's a constant noficiation when you're charging, so it's
completely useless when your phone is on charge, as it will always be
orange (or green, if it's fully charged).
Like most other
flagships, the HTC One M9 does have a slight camera bulge, which does
change the way you put it down, if you don't have a case.
The Camera Experience
The front-facing camera on the M9 is fantastic. Really great
low-light performance, making it ideal for video calls where you
can't guarantee studio lighting. However the “auto makeup”
feature, enabled by default, causes video taken with the front-facing
camera to have out-of-sync audio. My solution was to disable this
feature, since I don't use it anyway, but this could become an issue
for those who do want to use the feature, as they will have to enable
and disable this feature in between switching from taking photos to
filming video with the front-facing camera.
The rear camera is a bit of a mixed bag at best. While it takes good
enough photos to my amateur eye, it doesn't do very well at all in
low-light or high-contrast situations. However there are many
shooting modes, including a manual shooting mode, so this issue may
be resolveable by photography hobbyists who are familiar with this
kind of thing. But for the average user who just wants to point and
shoot, it really isn't good enough.
Upon reviewing footage taken with the phone, the framerates vary
wildly between 20 and 30 frames per second. The GSM Arena page for
the M9 lists 1080p@60fps, but this
is apparently not enabled by default. I believe that “Fast Full HD”
is the option I need to enable to get this framerate and resolution,
but this is based only on recording video with this mode enabled and
noting that it was much smoother (upon examining the file with my computer, it is apparently only 40 frames per second--where are all my frames going?). The camera app itself does not give
any explanation for what this feature does—or indeed, what any
feature does. This is an issue that is ubiquitous in the M9's
interface, and it will come up more in this review.
The M9 organizes photos in the most irritating way. Rather than
organizing everything by camera used, or app used, it organizes many
photos into several folders, making it a pain to keep track of how
many copies of a photo you have. A selfie will end up in the “Camera
shots” folder as well as the “Selfies” folder. A photo sent via
Telegram will end up in the “Telegram” folder as well as the
“Camera shots” folder, while a photo downloaded via Snapchat will
end up in both “Snapchat” and “Pictures”. I'd rather have a
folder for pictures taken with the camera, and a folder for each app
that allows downloading of pictures. In my case, I'd have “Photos”,
“Snapchat”, and “Telegram”. Nice and simple, and saves me
deleting the same photo two or three times.
Another issue is that not all images are placed into the DCIM folder
on your phone, so you have to go hunting into these weird folders in
order to copy everything to your PC. Folders, that as far as I can
tell, do not actually exist. Incredibly, incredibly frustrating,
making photo organisation a complete mess. The solution here would be
to simply organise everything into one folder, perhaps with
sub-folders. There are no options to change the way that photos are
organised, in the camera app or the gallery app. I'll talk later
about HTC's disregard for the phone to PC experience.
Photos are dated down to the time, although videos are only dated to
the year. So while you can organise your photos properly according to
date, videos only have the year to go on. I'm also confused as to
whether the phone needs GPS or not in order to retrieve location data
about the photo. It needs GPS enabled in order to retrieve
coordinates for sure, but I can't tell whether it applies location
data based on IP address or cellular networks when GPS is not
available.
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| An example of the date on a video |
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| An example of the date on a photo |
While the camera rotates whether or not auto-rotate is on, the gallery app does not, meaning that if I film a video with my phone and want to immediately review it, I have to enable auto-rotate, or I'll be looking at the video with big black bars on the top and bottom. The simple solution would be to offer a “full screen” button for the gallery app, akin to the YouTube app.
A particularly bad experience I had with the M9's camera app involved
it refusing to take pictures of any kind (despite the camera working
in Snapchat). I then tried the RAW capture mode, which crashed the
phone. Rebooting the phone triggered an “upgrade”, and then
everything worked as intended. I hope this is a one-off, because
often when you're taking pictures, you can't afford to wait for your
phone to restart. If this had happened during some cool show or
something, I'd have been out of luck.
The Audio Experience
The microphone on the M9 is good. I've got reports of good quality at
the other end of Hangouts calls, and the noise-cancelling mic works
as intended. The only problem I have is when I turn my head while on
a call in bed, and my voice is cancelled, but I don't think there's
anything that can be done about that except to turn and face the
phone.
When it comes to phone speakers, there's no competition. The M9 blows
its flagship competitors out of the water with its loud and clear
front-facing speakers. Gone are the days of cupping my hands over the
back of my phone to make sure my friends can hear the video I'm
showing them. With the multimedia functions of a phone seeing far
more use than the actual phone functions, nice speakers are a
necessity, and the competition is severely lacking in that regard.
The One M9 seems to have an issue with OGG audio files, high-bitrate
audio files, or both; as playback of my high-bitrate OGG stutters so
badly it's unlistenable. Converting my music to MP3 solved this
issue, but it would be nice to be able to keep everything in my
preferred format.
YouTube cards cause the top menu and home buttons to appear on-screen
during the video, which is a pain. It could be Google's problem for
all I know, but somebody needs to fix it.
The Battery Life
The battery life on this phone is good. I've never reached the end of
the day with zero percent, although I've come close once.
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| The redundant power saver notification. |
The Bloatware
Alas, despite its high cost, the M9 still comes with bloatware as if
it were some $20 phone that needed some way to subsidise its cost.
Aside from all of HTC's own bloatware, the M9 also comes with
third-party bloatware, such as Skype and Polaris Office. The original
variant I purchased also came with a bunch of Telstra bloatware. The
Facebook bloatware is removable; but it's the only piece of
bloatware that is removable.
Bloatware is a severe disappointment. Users should not have to root
their phones in order to get rid of software they don't want. And to
be honest, I'm going to include most of HTC's “useful” software
in the category of bloatware. If you want to give your Android phones
a custom skin, fine. But I draw the line at irremovable non-stock
software. One piece of software, “Zoe”, even has the cheek to
offer an uninstall option that simply replaces it with the “stock
version”. In other words, it's irremovable.
One perplexing piece of bloatware is “Kid Mode”. It comes with
the phone, but when you click on it, it simply gives you a message
assuring you that an update to Kid Mode is on its way. I personally
can't wait for the update to finally come through so I can hand my
$900 smartphone over to a toddler.
Sync options
Syncing is a pain in the ass on the HTC One M9. More specifically,
not syncing. There are just too many options, and I have no idea what
syncs to what, and it honestly feels like the phone wants to sync
whether or not you want it to. I got tired of the Google Drive
prompts, prompting me to sync this, that, or the other to Google
Drive. Even now I have no idea what syncs to Google, what syncs to
HTC, and I think something may be syncing to Samsung in there
somewhere. This is seriously unnerving, especially when the same
company offers data storage options (Google Drive) and data sharing
options (Google+) at the same time.
I've had some serious issues with trying to connect the HTC One M9 to
my computer, as well. The first variant I had simply refused. It
would appear as a CD, and a prompt would appear on my phone, telling
me to install HTC's sync software in order to use my phone with my
PC. This meant that the only way to transfer files manually from my
phone to my computer or vice-versa was to eject my SD card, insert it
into the computer, do the transfer, then put the SD card back into
the phone. A total pain in the ass. HTC's helpful response to this
issue was to “contact Ubuntu for drivers”. Fortunately my
replacement model doesn't have this issue to the same degree, but
it's still sporadic as hell. Sometimes the phone appears on the
computer, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it appears as a CD loaded
with software, sometimes both the CD and the phone appear at the same
time. Really disappointing Linux support from HTC.
The interface and stock apps
HTC's Android skin/interface is pretty bad, so I'll start with a few
good points.
The Play Store icon is permanently at the top of the app menu, making it easy to find
The always-accessible Play Store button - You can customise the buttons at the bottom of the screen
- You can customise the drop-down menu at the top of the screen. The default setup is fine, but I chose to replace whatever “HTC Connect” is with the GPS button, so I don't have to dig through menus to enable and disable it.
- When setting an alarm, scrolling through the minutes column is super fast, and stops automatically at increments of 10, cutting down the time it takes to create an alarm.
- Double-tap to wake
- Swipe up to wake and bring up unlock screen
My main issue with the interface on the HTC One M9 is that it's just
plain unintuitive. I won't hold against it the fact that I
immediately swapped the keyboard for Swiftkey, since Swiftkey is
pretty much the best, but the rest of the unintuitiveness doesn't
stop at being not as good as Swiftkey. Buttons are completely
meaningless, and never labelled, leaving me hunting for the “share”
button, finding it, and asking “How the hell does that symbol
represent sharing'?” Notifications appear over the top of the
screen, and don't go away for something like 10 seconds, and since
none of the settings in the menu have any description, I have no idea
if changing it is even an option. The camera buttons have no descriptions either.
Auto-brightness is a little dodgy, and not actually representative of
how much light I'm getting in the face. Sometimes I sit with a face
full of sunlight, and the screen goes as dark as it can, making it
impossible to read.
Notification lights set in Telegram don't appear to actually work
properly, but I don't know if this is because of Telegram, HTC, or
some sort of Android API issue.
One odd and annoying bug I experienced was re-setting the phone from
scratch after failing to return it, and it completely ignored my
“update over Wi-Fi only” setting, and completely burned through
all my data right there in the mall, downloading and updating apps.
The notes app is much better than the app that came with my Samsung
phone, but still leaves something to be desired. For one, it's not
particularly dynamic. For example, if you want a note with a
check-list, it has to be created with the check-list template. You
also can't remove check boxes, for some reason. Meaning if you decide
that you're not content with just ticking something off, and you want
to delete it from the list, you're left with a blank box creating a
ton of whitespace, and making it harder to see everything all at
once.
The email app isn't very good. The inbox simply does not go back far
enough for anybody to use the phone as their main way to access
email. The sidebar is not a list of folders belonging to the open
email account, but rather a list of recently accessed folders. In
order to put folders there, you need to open them. In order to do
that, you need to make an extra click on the folder icon next to your
email address—an extra click in an interface that is chock full of
unnecessary clicks.
One quick thing, not a big deal--the alarm noises scare the crap out of drivers. Make sure if you're about to get into a car that you turn off any alarms that might go off. They are loud and piercing.
The heat issue
I'm sure a few of you CTRL-F'd your way to this part of the article
after being lead here by an internet search for “HTC One M9
overheating” because this really is the “hot” issue with this
phone.
The Snapdragon 810 processor that comes with this phone has a heat
issue, so the phone gets hot. All the time, doing anything. Taking
pictures, using apps, listening to music, charging, turning the
screen on. You name it, it makes the phone hot. The power saving mode
that reduces performance does very little to reduce the heat that
comes from this phone. According to HTC, it should never get “too
hot to touch”, but I'd like to know how they define that. I've
never received burns from the phone, but I've sure had to put it down
after use.
With the heat that comes from this phone during normal use, I would
be terrified to play games on it. I'm worried that I'm going to have
to run a benchmark and wrap the phone in a towel to get the solder to
melt back, or that the heat will rupture the battery or something.
HTC would have been better off going with the 808, which has two
fewer high-power cores, but because of reduced thermal throttling,
would probably perform about as well, while reducing power use and
heat output.
It seems like HTC are constantly releasing updates to try and battle
the heat issue, while also maintaining a balance with performance.
After some it's cooler, after others it's warmer. Nobody wins either
way—you either lose performance or gain heat. But I guess it won't
perform as badly with a lower clock as it will thermal throttling.
With the HTC One M9, HTC have egg on their face—and they can cook
it on the back of their phone.
