"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi guys my name is tom and the tech chap and welcome to my in-depth review of the htc one m9 on the whole htc is taking a if name broke don't fix it attitude to the m9 which features fairly modest improvements and changes of its predecessor the m8 but the one component they have considered needed fixing is the camera i really liked the m7 and the m8 when they came out but the one feature i did wish they would improve on is the camera i think it's one of the areas that has let down the series so far so it's great to see that htc has listened and made it a change note i'm saying change as opposed to improvement or upgrade but we'll look at later at just what the new camera can do for the m9 aside from a fairly minor spec bump including a new snapdragon 810 processor there's not a great deal new with the m9 it's definitely an evolutionary product not revolutionary in terms of design i think it's fair to say that the change from the m8 to the m9 here is definitely quite subtle um the evolution from the m7 the m8 and the m9 is it's not huge but it has progressively got nicer i think the m8 was quite a big improvement on the m7 with this brushed uh metal design and that's sort of featured again here on the n9 so it's certainly not a radical departure from the m8 in fact if you put them side by side uh i think you'll have to look at the back in order to really be sure which one you're looking at they still come with this sort of uh very uh tall design build i think so the sort of double layer bezel here it still features the two awesome stereo boom sound speakers but the biggest change here which you'll notice is the new camera on the back gone is the duo camera setup of the m8 and this looks a little more reminiscent of the m7 thanks to this new 20 megapixel camera so it's certainly a tool device and thanks to these fairly chunky bezels we get a pretty average uh screen to body ratio of 68.5 percent but that is slightly up on the 66.7 percent of the m8 so it's an ever slightly more compact phone but uh it's still undoubtedly very tall but it's really really nice to look at and we can talk about screen to body ratios and bezel sizes and thickness and weight which we will but i think it's important just to just take a step back and really do appreciate the design of this because in a lot of smartphones although they are improving uh the htc since the m7 series and has really sort of been at the forefront of what most people consider to be really good design it is a bit chunky and a little bit heavy it's 9.6 millimeters thick so uh it's got a bit of a bit of a heft to it and it's reasonably heavy at 157 grams if we compare that to 152 grams on the sony z3 and as low as 138 on the new s6 so it's a bit chunky it's a bit heavy but thanks to this gorgeous full one-piece aluminium body it looks very very nice and uh i know i can't stop just uh shimmering this brush that brushed metal effect for you here it's generally very nice to look at now in the hand the m8 was said to be quite slippery and i would have agreed with that and this is a little better in terms of uh being able to hold it well if i uh zoom right in here you can see that the uh so the back casing almost houses the front and if we get really close you can see there's a bit of a lip here which uh on the one hand uh is a bit of an interesting design feature but on the other it actually does add a little more grip you get a bit of a tapering here a bit of a lip as i'm running my fingernail along so that sort of adds to the comfort adds to the durability adds to the grip a bit but also uh with extended use i've found it sort of almost sort of stabs into your fingers a little bit it's not uncomfortable but you do start to notice it you sort of gets uh really sort of stabs in there a little bit but it's uh that's an incredibly minor point and actually i prefer the fact that i feel a little more comfortable holding it than the m8 so a lot of people do talk about the bezels and you know for some just people just don't care about the bezels it's a good phone and it's uh it doesn't really matter if it's extra a few inch few centimeters of um bezel but fortunately you know as i say they do use them well mostly the top and bottom are adorned with the stereo speakers which the htc called boom sound we'll talk about the sound quality later but i will tell you now that these are the best um examples of the boom sound speakers we've seen so far on a hd device and by extension therefore i believe the best speakers on any smartphone on the market so that's really a selling point for the device and um you know a lot of phones do have a fairly chunky top and bottom bezels so it's great to see that sort of they're being utilized here with very good stereo speakers i'd like to see that more on other devices you know some people say it's unnecessary this little black bar here that features the htc logo it's obviously not unnecessary i'm sure hd designers would love to get rid of it if they can and no doubt how there's some sensors or bits and pieces but i don't think the good people at htc are there just to annoy you i'm sure it's there for a solid reason but it does add to the height and you do sort of get this silver black and then software button almost three tier uh lower bezel which just perhaps it looks a touch peculiar but you get used to it and it's a minor point so if we take a bit of a tour of the device on the right we have pretty much everything to be honest we've got the power button the volume up and down buttons and also the micro sd card slot and also on the left we have nothing really except the nano sim card tray so we've got a nice flush left side and we've got pretty much everything on the right what that means is although the power button which is the lower of the three buttons here is easily reachable by your index or thumb depending which hand you're using i do notice that despite using this quite a lot over the last few weeks i still do get these wrong i'm still pressing the power down button for the sort of volume down button for the power and also sort of vice versa i'm getting them a bit mixed up it does seem a bit odd that you wouldn't place at least one of them perhaps the power button or more commonly even the volume buttons on the left side uh so how they have all these so close there's a minor texture texture difference the volume buttons are very sort of metallic and it's a bit of a bit more scratchy texture to the power button so you can feel the difference if you're looking out for it but on a day-to-day basis where you just want to sort of click the power button or click the volume up button you're not really feeling around for textures so you do occasionally mistake the power the volume buttons for the power in addition to all that on the front it doesn't look a great deal different but this is actually now an ultra pixel camera on the m7 and the m8 htc did use an ultra pixel camera on the back which uh sort of they hyped to be better than megapixels it would be you'd have fewer pixels but they'd be bigger hence the name ultra and so it was supposed to let in more light and offer better photography the merits of the camera will go into later but essentially what's happened now is they've moved that ultra pixel camera from the back onto the front so now we get a pretty cool four megapixel sorry for ultra pixel front selfie camera so that's definitely an improvement on the m8 but it doesn't look that dissimilar and obviously on the back we have the new 20 megapixel camera with a dual led flash on the side so aside from that and a couple of bands to allow connections uh through it's very very similar to the m8 and i think anyone who's used the m8 will appreciate or at least if when you hold this you'll be right at home with it whether you prefer you would you wanted a bit of an improvement on the m9 or you were quite happy with how the m8 looked is obviously up to you but this is unmistakably a nice looking device and it's a bit more grippy but certainly we're not seeing a lot of innovation in terms of the design here but as i said in the intro if it ain't broke don't fix it and i think the design and build quality of the m9 is one of the empty of your one series uh entirely is one of its selling points and that's something that people have really grown to love i appreciate so i agree with them it's a great design it'd be nice if they perhaps trim the bezels a touch more but aside from that it's a solid looking phone really really nice and i think the only thing that looks a little odd is how the tops edge is almost entirely taken by the ir blaster for controlling your tv for example it has quite a pleasant smooth texture to it but um it if you compare it to the galaxy s6 which has a very very small ir emitter right here it does seem a bit odd that they've taken up the entire top edge with it but obviously that doesn't really matter who's going to be looking at the top but on the whole a very very good looking phone i think probably one of my favorite looking devices it's um comparable from my friends have said to the iphone 6 in terms of just how premium and high class it is and i promise very soon i will stop shimmering this in the light but it's uh it is quite nice to look at so let's move on to the display and this section won't take that long because it's not really a lot different we still have a five inch 1080p display which gives it 441 pixels per inch so it's reasonably sharp you're not really going to see pixels or anything and it's the same lcd 3 technology that they've used on the m8 before it's reasonably bright at 508 nits but uh it's a little poor compared to the galaxy s6 and iphone 6 which you can see in this little picture here so it's still a 1080p and well some will say that that's a bad thing because other phones like the lg g3 galaxy s6 and the galaxy s6 edge all have what they call qhd screens so that's 1440 by 2560 resolution beyond full hd essentially resolution screens um others say that well you don't really notice the improvement it's going beyond what people can see and it's an and sort of unnecessary drain on the battery because obviously the displays do take up a lot of battery and it's one of the biggest components for battery usage so uh whatever camp you're in it's up to you all i'll say is that the screen is pretty much the same as the m8 and also very very similar to the m7 1080p still the colors are nice it's uh unlike the samsung phones it's quite a a natural almost nor not almost cool but not i wouldn't just go as far as describing it as cool temperature it's not too garish or anything it's a solid display viewing angles are reasonable but they sort of fall behind the touch of the device as you can see there as i uh turn this to a bit of an acute angle you can see that the viewing angles aren't spectacular but they're they're pretty good and then that's in brighton days this uh struggles a touch perhaps compared to the competition but it's still all around a very solid screen so the final thing to say about the fact that this isn't qhd um i i'm still in the camp that qhd isn't really necessary on a phone especially this size is only five inches and it would just offer almost 600 ppi ridiculous pixel density so now the argument against qhd is that obviously is battery draining although to the extent it is is debatable but as we'll go on to later the battery doesn't really uh impress that much so we're not seeing a great deal of benefit as a result of not going for the qhd screen so it's another example of the m9 just being sort of more of the same from htc it's uh perhaps there are subtle improvements and if we and if you compare it side by side perhaps you'll see very slight changes but overall the display is as good as we expect it's the same as before and it's you know perfectly good and uh quite enjoyable to use so let's get into something a little bit more meaty and talk about the performance of the one m9 inside we have qualcomm's latest snapdragon 810 chip which is a 64-bit octa-core chipset up from the snapdragon 801 in the m8 alongside that we've got three gigabytes of ram again up from two in the m8 and inside we have 32 gigabytes of built-in storage with a micro sd port which supports up to 128 gigabyte card so that's really really good on the storage front but a good base amount of internal storage and also an excellent amount of expandable memory so we're in a world where we're seeing fewer and fewer flagships phones phones offering expandable memory i'm glad to see that htc is has stuck with it and we can enjoy some very large capacities so how fast is it well it's very very smooth it's fast everything works well like it plays all the games and apps i throw at it i'll jump into a couple of games in a second to show you and a combination of the sense 7 ui which is what the software is running on top of android here and a combination of that with the latest snapdragon chip and also three gigs of ram means that everything is really snappy really nice to use and uh you're not gonna notice any lag or response issues at all it's very very fast i always like to start with just looking at a benchmark or two uh whether you appreciate this benchmark result is up to you but i'll show you in anyway and on the antutu benchmark we see a score of 52 343 which is pretty impressive although it doesn't quite uh match the new xls processors in the samsung phones but again take with pinch of salt and uh it's obviously not really necessarily indicative of user experience how a phone scores in a benchmark but what i will say is that i've and i did a video on this is that there's been some issues or some news that perhaps the snapdragon 810 inside sort of throttles a bit as it overheats as it uses sort of intensive apps i put that to the test and i ran this benchmark about seven times and i did notice a drop in score from what we have here at about 50 to 52 000 down to about 43 44 000 so it shows that perhaps there is a bit of throttling but it's fairly minor um and i suppose when we're talking about that it is a whether it's a direct result of overheating i'm not sure i have to go test further but this does definitely get quite warm obviously this is a metal i believe aluminium body and so conducts heat well off the chip but as a result you can therefore feel it in your hand and it can become a little uncomfortable in terms of how warm it is obviously now that's just me running benchmarks over and over uh this is less noticeable in the real world but if you are playing a really intense app like modern combat 5 or real racing 3 which will i'll show you in just a second then you will notice that uh just around here it gets quite warm and you'll perhaps want to be changing the grip every now and then to cool it down so on you know on the plus side it's keeping the chip cool because it's dissipating through the metal body on the other hand it's you know you're feeling it so it's not hot it's just noticeably warm and there is a minor reduction for throttling in speed as a result of this i assume temperature gain so but it's not something you'll really see in the real world you may lose a frame or two in games but you won't really notice so that's the issue about throttling and overheating go and check out my website now i've written a uh feature on it it's not really something most people will notice or even realize but so uh except for me telling you now so beyond the benchmarks let's uh play some games i like to show you mon combat and real racing i think they're both pretty good looking games both quite intensive and although to be fair in most of my reviews recently pretty much every phone does run them well it's good just to prove that uh whatever whatever phone we're looking at can run the latest and greatest and most intense intensive games so you also have you have peace of mind that uh anything you throw at it will run well and it'll be fairly future-proofed now of course the benchmarks do say that although the samsung is a bit faster uh this is the fastest uh chip available on the market from qualcomm and sort of therefore probably the second fastest uh chip in the world for smartphones so uh you shouldn't be into any illusion that this isn't going to handle everything you throw at it perhaps the loading times and the frame rate is slightly less perhaps than the samsung phones but this is absolutely brilliant in itself and uh perhaps only side by side would you even notice that so as you can see it uh runs flawlessly it's uh i would yeah it's uh it's good to use everything is it's not getting too warm yes just yet although that does take a few minutes to kick in sometimes but uh overall nice and fast as you can see here frame rates nice and smooth responsive no really hints of lag or stutter so where it handles that nice and well so let's move on and jump into real racing three let's i'll fast forward this so uh we can jump right into the gameplay so you can see just how smooth it is so there we are it does take a fairly decent amount of time to load but we're in now so let's have a look at how it runs and you can see that it runs quite nicely now i will say that it's not got quite the frame rate perhaps that i would have expected um i've just finished reviewing the s6 and i do appreciate this as the htc review and this isn't a comparison video but it's you know you can't take a phone in a vacuum you have to look at it in terms of the competition as well and i'm noticing that the frame rate is a touch lower it's not quite as silky smooth but this is a very intensive app and uh not and doesn't represent um the fact that it's a touch slower in terms of frames so the general user interface it's only when you do throw intensive heavy games like this that you perhaps notice a bit of a drop in frame rate but it's um still you know more than playable it's really enjoyable to use and if you do purchase the htc one m9 then you'll you can throw anything you want in it and it'll run it well so um performance absolutely solid not market leading but excellent nonetheless now moving on from performance as i mentioned earlier it's not just about the hardware it's the combination of hardware and software that creates a good uh smooth responsive user interface and the sense 7 ui which is the htc skin on top of android which is running 5.0.2 here has been a really excellent selling feature of the one series since the m7 sense is uh it's not there's no there's not much bloatware it's responsive it's smooth it's fast and i'm just a fan of all of oh the settings menu is sort of really easy to grasp some other devices make it quite complicated everything is nice and simple and smooth and you've got no problems at all with it so one of the key things with sense is that you do get what they call blink feed if you go to the left of the home screen you can disable this if you like but i quite like it it's a flipboard esque news feed and other devices from other companies have sort of mimicked this and the success of the blinkfeed on the one series so you can you know add in your twitter feed your facebook get news updates and etc and i quite like it i still think it's the best implementation of a news feed and use board as flipboard as i say like um experience on a device i think they did it first and they still do it best so a combination of that and the general smoothness that which is carried over from previous devices which were you know they were flawlessly smooth as well um is really great now as i say it is smooth generally and you're gonna you know have any problems but there's a few areas that perhaps you do see a bit of a slowdown for example if you go to the menu where you can see your recent apps you can close them individually or you can press the x at the top to close them all let me just open a few more to add a few in the background like so now if you go to it as i say you can close them individually like that but the x takes just a few seconds to close them all as you can see it's it sort of becomes twice that long if you do have quite a few apps in the background and having used other phones recently as i say uh there's sort of no lag or uh loading time there so it's just one of those things where you notice there's a bit of a slowdown i'll come onto the camera later where there's a bit of a slowdown in hdr processing which is a little bit annoying but beyond those two sort of things on the whole it's very very fast and responsive so what's new with the m9 well not a great deal as i say it carries on the nice simple easy to use smoothness of uh that we're used to with scents but the two biggest new features are what they call locally localization based icons uh which to be fair i'll i doubt people will really use but also the slightly more interesting themes so uh basically the localization just means that depending on where you are your phone will uh you know follow you attract you with either gps or wi-fi and then you'll change your home screen settings or your um sorry icons to perhaps the office or perhaps to work and it takes a minute or two to set up and to be fair i just don't see anyone really using it obviously each to their own of course um but for me much more interestingly is the themes so let me show you that let's jump into that and what that means is if you don't like the uh default layout the default fonts and backgrounds you can download a few and you can also make your own perhaps if you've taken a picture um you can use that as a base for a theme the phone will pick out the colors and the uh sort of just the the theme essentially of that image and um spread it over your phone so i've downloaded a few let me give you an example i don't know this one called tilt which is a very dark very black design takes a few seconds and we have a quite different looking device you can see it goes as far as changing the icon style we've got circles now um the app drawer it's very very dark and black and it's quite interesting so let's try another one let's go back to themes and excuse me i and download to do another one which one did i go for i thought city look quite nice so let's apply that it takes a couple of seconds and so the biggest change obviously is just the background they can do stuff with icons this one doesn't appear to be a huge uh change from the uh normal theme but it's essentially an extended uh background extended wallpaper that spreads just a bit beyond just the uh wallpaper as i say so it's pretty nice uh you can see similar things on the new galaxy phones as well but uh i think the implementation from hd is a bit better and also the uh current the number of themes available is substantially more than the competition so if you're one of those people who want to uh create a new theme create uh your own very personalized phone then i think that's gonna be something you'll use um now and then and it's quite an interesting feature but on the whole i think it's interesting that i am spending so much time discussing uh you know app icons and uh wallpapers because there's not a great deal new in sense 7 with the m9 and obviously the m8 and i believe msm will also enjoy that update so these features won't just be unique to this device it's again it's a minor upgrade there's a few bits and pieces that are new but it's more of the same and that again is no bad thing necessarily it runs really well and uh sense i've always been a fan of because it's so reliable apps don't crash very often at all and on the whole everything is nice fast and responsive so the final things i'll mention about the sense 7 ui and the overall operating system is there's a couple of neat features you can find in the options for motions and gestures so we go to settings and then scroll down to uh the display and gestures and scroll down again to motion launch gestures so it's very well hidden you can enable double tap to wake and sleep and i think quite usefully volume button to launch the camera so uh you know i can if i turn this off i can double tap it like so to wake it up in addition to that if you scroll up to personalize you can actually change what software icons appear on the bottom so if we go to change navigation buttons you can add in auto rotate turn the screen off our navigation bar which i think is quite interesting so if you say you might want to turn that on you get extra button here and you can hide it like so and you can pull it up so i think that's one thing i i quite like i'm not sure whether i want to keep it on the uh bar here if i say you can make it a uh a widget on the home page but the fact that some people don't like the fact that software buttons do take up some of the screen real estate the fact that you can add in a uh button to get rid of that and add in you know get your screen back essentially is quite a nice feature now let's move on to the camera and this is where it gets a little bit more interesting i think the camera is the biggest change the biggest uh i'm not hesitating to say improvement at this stage but the biggest difference for sure in the new m9 so as i say the ultrapixel camera which we see on the m7 and m8 which was hyped to be good in low light and it was pretty decent it was good but did fall down against the competition i agree that megapixels are not everything it comes down to a lot more than that software sensor size the aperture etc but the ultra pixel was good and was marketed essentially for being good in low light and so sensibly i think they've moved it from the back to the front so now the front-facing camera or the selfie camera is that ultra pixel camera so now on the back we have a 20 megapixel camera and it's flanked by a dual led flash and supports up to 4k video recording now and also 1080p60 although i still recommend just keeping it on normal full hd which is 1080p 30. one thing it's lacking is optical image stabilization we're seeing that as a feature on more and more phones these days so it's a bit of a shame that we don't see it on there and that's not really the only feature that suffers a bit it does offer hdr mode as most phones do these days but it's not the best in terms of the uh what sort of picture it creates and also it's a bit slow if i go into the settings here turn on hdr you can see that it takes a good few seconds to process the shot and i don't i hate to mention the competition again but some of some new phones um can do that instantly pretty much so there's a bit of a delay there and it's not just the delay that's the issue i've took a couple of pictures one with and one without hdr to show you the difference and it is interesting just exactly what hdr does do and this is a picture of me i was scripting or writing some notes for this review and i thought i'll just take a picture of myself with it and also this is the picture with it with hdr on and as you can see it's far from a natural picture it is certainly a difference i'm not sure it's particularly better it does brighten up the dark areas you can see that the grass in the corner which was created by a shadow is has more detail you can see more of it so that's fair it does brighten things up but what it does to my face and just the overall brightness and color temperature of the photo i'm not a fan of i think it uh ruins it a bit it makes me look like i've got the sun in my face so it's loaded process and doesn't produce great results so we haven't got ois the hdr mode is not great and um it's just sort of not a great start for the camera now obviously the camera is one thing i really did want to be improved on this the m7 and m8 were good but decent with the ultra pixel but i've been i've been crossing my fingers that htc would come up with something new and sort of fix it make it you know in the same league as the other phones on the market and unfortunately it's not it's a bit average um there is an update expected for this which is supposed to improve the rear camera only quality but i'm reviewing this as is and i think that's fair now i went to the gadget show live in birmingham england a week or so ago i don't know if any of you saw my video on that and i had the htc one m9 as my phone for that day so let's go through a few pictures which i took now uh first off this is um a picture of a press room where i was uh networking obviously and mingling with my fellow ugly uh journalists and as you can see it's a decent picture there's nothing you know particularly interesting about it but um if you zoom in you sort of the quality isn't there so it's on the face of it it's a decent picture lighting is is good and the colors are natural but as soon as you start to zoom in you do see that a lot of quality and detail which is actually what really the uh ultra pixel camera suffered with it was when you zoomed in you didn't you could see the lack of detail so move on i did a selfie here so this is a look at the front-facing camera i don't know if anyone watches the gadget show uh tv program which airs on channel 5 in the uk this is one of the presenters a a very nice man called mr john bentley and i was lucky enough to have quick snap a quick selfie of the two of us and although i don't judge the colors here because it was a purple stage you can see that this is an example of the ultrapixel camera which is supposed to be good in low or difficult light i was a bit disappointed by it as a camera and i found in my use of the ultrapixel camera that it's just still as perhaps as bad as i remember um so we've got a new technology a new kind of camera on the back we've got the old sort on the front and unfortunately neither are particularly good they're absolutely fine they're capable if i go into this uh picture with um this is a nice man called leon doyle he was a former runner up on the apprentice in the uk selling his great product the wi-fi plug i'm not being paid to say that i just thought it was a decent product and you can see that the camera you know it is fine everything's fine and on the face of it it colors it decent and combined with the natural color reproduction of the lcd 3 display that we have on the htc everything looks quite natural nothing's oversaturated or overly vivid which i do like and i do appreciate i'm getting the impression that it's a capable phone uh a capable camera but it doesn't really stand up to the competition that well and you can see here i've took a picture of my camera setup for the show and it looks you know it's focused on the dslr obviously and that looks you know fairly good but again as soon as you zoom in the text on the camera is is blurry it's it's not particularly sharp and they almost haul the background rather than getting a really nice depth of field effect you're getting blown out white so you're getting um blur and whether that's a result of the lack of optical image stabilization or just other issues i don't know but you're not getting a particularly pleasant photo overall let's give it another chance so i took this to a national trust park here in the uk it's called stower head in wiltshire i believe it's a very beautiful place if anyone's seen the colin firth adaption of pride and prejudice you may recognize it uh i doubt many of you will especially since 90 i think of my audience is male but it's a beautiful place nonetheless and this is another example of how the hdr mode makes everything unnaturally bright you can see here the difference in the exact same picture with one with and one without hdr i think you can see immediately which one has hdr and it just creates a i'm not going to say bad picture it's just very different and very unnatural i think is the best way of describing it so but moving on this picture of this of the grass looks it looks nice it's reasonably detailed reasonably crisp colors are good and i think that's the one good thing we are seeing is that colors are natural colors are nice they're they're vibrant but they're not too punchy and i think that's perhaps one of the best parts of it but as we go through whites are often blown out it can't really take good dynamic range of photos because i can't really utilize the hdr because it creates these really weird pictures so um we're getting sort of skies are blown out and perhaps dark foregrounds so on the whole i think it can be summed up by saying that it's it lacks detail it lacks clarity and sharpness it's got good color reproduction a good color temperature but a poor hdr mode no ois and generally just a you know a lack of features perhaps means it's a bit of an average camera but and this this is also visible as on the video side of things as well as i say this takes up to 4k video now but if i show you a video it's decent it um is a bit jittery i'm actually sitting down at this point so it should be very very little in terms of uh judder or um what's the opposite of smoothness um but you know colors are reasonable as i say that's what's coming across often but it's just a bit disappointing that uh the one thing that i really wish that htc would improve on they've not so much improved on just changed for an equally not brilliant camera so um this is one of the areas that is disappointing and will be capable for most will be functional for most but when compared with the competition out there it does fall behind quite substantially unfortunately but finally talking about the camera it does have a couple of features something called zoe which uh if i didn't want to use the one series phone sims the m7 you'll you'll know about it sort of takes a whole lot of stills and then puts them into a burst to almost to create a video image it's been expanded now you can find friends on it it's become a bit of a social networking hub it seems for htc i'm not sure who would actually use it in that way but what you can do is even if you didn't take the pictures when you did take the pictures in zoe mode you can add them in to a zoe mode so you can get a bit of a a movie or a bit of a video of your images so if i uh perhaps put these pictures of the gadget show thing on into a bit of a list you can see how this works like so so it's quite neat it sort of is a shortcut just you know it avoids editing if you want to do that um i'm not sure you necessarily want to use their default sounds and music but you can change it so it's a nice little feature which is fair and also in the camera in terms of talking about features you can add more modes uh obviously we have the selfie mode for the front normal for the back and pretty stunning panoramas and interestingly that's about it but you can download more if i go to add there's uh well a couple more to download if you want to uh expand the feature list of the camera inside we've got a 2840 milliamp hour battery which is uh 240 milliamps uh more than the m8 so we're expecting a bit of a better battery life and i think we do see a slight improvement over the m8 but on the whole it's still very average i ran the geekbench rundown test which is a good indicator of how long the battery is essentially you can see that it took three hours and 38 to run down from 100 to zero percent now that number doesn't necessarily mean anything to you but if i were to say that the galaxy s6 uh took 5 hours and 50 to do the same thing in the exact same test it does set alarm bells ringing now i think that's a bit severe i don't think my experience in in actually using the phone does represent that huge gap that huge uh difference there but what i will say is very similar to the camera the battery life is quite average um it's a bit disappointing for a flagship and especially as i mentioned in terms of the display without the quad hd screen we're not getting a benefit of a sharper screen here perhaps at the expense of battery no there's no qhd screen it's just a bit of a okay battery life so as with most devices and as is in the case with this you'll get a day out of it a solid day but you'll be sort of down to about 20 maybe 25 at late evening if you have a normal walking down a day out of it obviously everyone's use is different but i expect it to uh you know we have to charge it overnight and although this does offer fast charging um it's a bit weird that you need to have a special cable for that which they don't bundle with it you have to go and buy one separately so that does increase the speed of the charge if you were to go and buy one a fair bit it promises htc promise zero to sixty percent in about half an hour uh i tested this it took about in that time it only got to about 35 percent but it's still better than default charging speed and mitigates a little bit the very average battery life but there's no wireless charging or anything it's just uh quick charging but you do have to go and buy a bit of an accessory for that and also as we're used to with most phones these days there are a power saving and ultra power saving mode which the ultra basically just makes it a very basic phone and messaging device but will give you days of battery essentially so i will say that you'll probably be getting used to putting saver mode on quite a bit to extend the longevity of the m9 as it's uh not great so again it's not bad and this is i can hear myself repeating my the same adjectives in terms of the battery as i did with the camera it's not bad it will do it's fine unless you put it side by side with other devices you know maybe not even realize it's not brilliant but it's not brilliant it's solid it's decent it's average it's uh not perhaps what i'd hoped for out of a 550 plus pound um flagship from htc especially given how little innovation we're seeing elsewhere as i say there's no qhd screen here to blame it on the last couple of areas have been a little bit critical the camera the battery they've been a bit disappointing but one thing that is still excellent and still class leading is the sound quality the m9 uses the stereo boom sound speakers which have been excellent ever since the m7 and in addition to that have implemented some software from dolby which uh gives it either a slightly more surrounding surround sound experience but also a punchier better richer experience now you can go into the settings and change uh what you want like what you would like dolby software to do personally i quite like the theater mode it adds a bit of a scale perhaps to my to my music so let me show you i put some spotify on just quickly um hopefully i don't compromise any license issues so let me show you what this software actually does to the sound so in the settings at the moment i have music mode enabled on the double surround setting so if i play a bit of tom petty i'll shut up and you can hear the difference up so you can hear that the theater sound setting gives an extra bit of volume gives a bit of punch to the music and i actually quite like having the theater mode on and it makes for me the m9 the best phone um on the market essentially for listening and playing music from thanks to the stereo speakers which are really loud except as i say wouldn't go quite to max volume but they're loud they're punchy they're bassy and also the extra derby audio which to me is one of the hidden more hidden but the best features of the new m9 is the the theater mode uh for me although you may prefer the music mode does add a little bit of something for my music and i listen to quite a bit of music and it's not just the loudspeakers it's effects it'll also affect your headphones and bluetooth headsets so sound quality sound volume is really uh best in class for the htc so it's nice to come from having being a bit disappointed as i say about the camera and the battery life to having such a really key selling feature here of sound finally in terms of call quality uh it's just as good as the sound quality i'm pleased to say thanks to active noise cancellation from a dedicated mic uh it's definitely above average in terms of call quality and puts the competitors like the s6 which i noted have to have pretty average to almost poor core quality to shame the htc really is a lot better in that regard just for simply making calls which uh you know for a smartphone one of the most fundamental features is to get it you know to get right is to offer a good um phone a good call a good audio quality and this really does it well so it's no surprise that thanks to these speakers and the software and the noise cancelling mic that it achieves very good call quality but it is uh one of those extra little things that although perhaps isn't the most important feature anymore on our smart on our smartphones i'm glad that htc has got right in conclusion i really wanted to like the m9 more it's a shame that a combination of a fairly poor camera average battery life and overall just a bit of a lack of innovation this year means that for the fact that it's such a high-end flagship and expensive phone there's just not a great deal to be impressed about on the m9 something that we haven't already been impressed with on the m7 or m8 but it still has a great design albeit being a bit chunky it still has really great speakers best in class and a combination of the snapdragon 810 and sense 7ui means it's a really smooth and responsive user experience the m9 is certainly a solid phone and htc has a bit of a underdog status you also want them to do well but you can't review these smartphones in a vacuum you have to consider them in a sort of real world competitive market and when you compare this side by side with for example the galaxy s6 or s6 edge the m9 does fall behind a bit so it's a good smartphone but it does suffer from a bit of a lack of innovation this year and also extremely strong competition so that's been my in-depth review of the htc one m9 i hope you've enjoyed it if you'd like to find out more check out the techjack.com and follow me on twitter at the tech chat please subscribe guys it really helps and you can keep up to date with my latest videos but there's nothing more than to say thank you very much for watching and hopefully see you again soon cheers guys youhi guys my name is tom and the tech chap and welcome to my in-depth review of the htc one m9 on the whole htc is taking a if name broke don't fix it attitude to the m9 which features fairly modest improvements and changes of its predecessor the m8 but the one component they have considered needed fixing is the camera i really liked the m7 and the m8 when they came out but the one feature i did wish they would improve on is the camera i think it's one of the areas that has let down the series so far so it's great to see that htc has listened and made it a change note i'm saying change as opposed to improvement or upgrade but we'll look at later at just what the new camera can do for the m9 aside from a fairly minor spec bump including a new snapdragon 810 processor there's not a great deal new with the m9 it's definitely an evolutionary product not revolutionary in terms of design i think it's fair to say that the change from the m8 to the m9 here is definitely quite subtle um the evolution from the m7 the m8 and the m9 is it's not huge but it has progressively got nicer i think the m8 was quite a big improvement on the m7 with this brushed uh metal design and that's sort of featured again here on the n9 so it's certainly not a radical departure from the m8 in fact if you put them side by side uh i think you'll have to look at the back in order to really be sure which one you're looking at they still come with this sort of uh very uh tall design build i think so the sort of double layer bezel here it still features the two awesome stereo boom sound speakers but the biggest change here which you'll notice is the new camera on the back gone is the duo camera setup of the m8 and this looks a little more reminiscent of the m7 thanks to this new 20 megapixel camera so it's certainly a tool device and thanks to these fairly chunky bezels we get a pretty average uh screen to body ratio of 68.5 percent but that is slightly up on the 66.7 percent of the m8 so it's an ever slightly more compact phone but uh it's still undoubtedly very tall but it's really really nice to look at and we can talk about screen to body ratios and bezel sizes and thickness and weight which we will but i think it's important just to just take a step back and really do appreciate the design of this because in a lot of smartphones although they are improving uh the htc since the m7 series and has really sort of been at the forefront of what most people consider to be really good design it is a bit chunky and a little bit heavy it's 9.6 millimeters thick so uh it's got a bit of a bit of a heft to it and it's reasonably heavy at 157 grams if we compare that to 152 grams on the sony z3 and as low as 138 on the new s6 so it's a bit chunky it's a bit heavy but thanks to this gorgeous full one-piece aluminium body it looks very very nice and uh i know i can't stop just uh shimmering this brush that brushed metal effect for you here it's generally very nice to look at now in the hand the m8 was said to be quite slippery and i would have agreed with that and this is a little better in terms of uh being able to hold it well if i uh zoom right in here you can see that the uh so the back casing almost houses the front and if we get really close you can see there's a bit of a lip here which uh on the one hand uh is a bit of an interesting design feature but on the other it actually does add a little more grip you get a bit of a tapering here a bit of a lip as i'm running my fingernail along so that sort of adds to the comfort adds to the durability adds to the grip a bit but also uh with extended use i've found it sort of almost sort of stabs into your fingers a little bit it's not uncomfortable but you do start to notice it you sort of gets uh really sort of stabs in there a little bit but it's uh that's an incredibly minor point and actually i prefer the fact that i feel a little more comfortable holding it than the m8 so a lot of people do talk about the bezels and you know for some just people just don't care about the bezels it's a good phone and it's uh it doesn't really matter if it's extra a few inch few centimeters of um bezel but fortunately you know as i say they do use them well mostly the top and bottom are adorned with the stereo speakers which the htc called boom sound we'll talk about the sound quality later but i will tell you now that these are the best um examples of the boom sound speakers we've seen so far on a hd device and by extension therefore i believe the best speakers on any smartphone on the market so that's really a selling point for the device and um you know a lot of phones do have a fairly chunky top and bottom bezels so it's great to see that sort of they're being utilized here with very good stereo speakers i'd like to see that more on other devices you know some people say it's unnecessary this little black bar here that features the htc logo it's obviously not unnecessary i'm sure hd designers would love to get rid of it if they can and no doubt how there's some sensors or bits and pieces but i don't think the good people at htc are there just to annoy you i'm sure it's there for a solid reason but it does add to the height and you do sort of get this silver black and then software button almost three tier uh lower bezel which just perhaps it looks a touch peculiar but you get used to it and it's a minor point so if we take a bit of a tour of the device on the right we have pretty much everything to be honest we've got the power button the volume up and down buttons and also the micro sd card slot and also on the left we have nothing really except the nano sim card tray so we've got a nice flush left side and we've got pretty much everything on the right what that means is although the power button which is the lower of the three buttons here is easily reachable by your index or thumb depending which hand you're using i do notice that despite using this quite a lot over the last few weeks i still do get these wrong i'm still pressing the power down button for the sort of volume down button for the power and also sort of vice versa i'm getting them a bit mixed up it does seem a bit odd that you wouldn't place at least one of them perhaps the power button or more commonly even the volume buttons on the left side uh so how they have all these so close there's a minor texture texture difference the volume buttons are very sort of metallic and it's a bit of a bit more scratchy texture to the power button so you can feel the difference if you're looking out for it but on a day-to-day basis where you just want to sort of click the power button or click the volume up button you're not really feeling around for textures so you do occasionally mistake the power the volume buttons for the power in addition to all that on the front it doesn't look a great deal different but this is actually now an ultra pixel camera on the m7 and the m8 htc did use an ultra pixel camera on the back which uh sort of they hyped to be better than megapixels it would be you'd have fewer pixels but they'd be bigger hence the name ultra and so it was supposed to let in more light and offer better photography the merits of the camera will go into later but essentially what's happened now is they've moved that ultra pixel camera from the back onto the front so now we get a pretty cool four megapixel sorry for ultra pixel front selfie camera so that's definitely an improvement on the m8 but it doesn't look that dissimilar and obviously on the back we have the new 20 megapixel camera with a dual led flash on the side so aside from that and a couple of bands to allow connections uh through it's very very similar to the m8 and i think anyone who's used the m8 will appreciate or at least if when you hold this you'll be right at home with it whether you prefer you would you wanted a bit of an improvement on the m9 or you were quite happy with how the m8 looked is obviously up to you but this is unmistakably a nice looking device and it's a bit more grippy but certainly we're not seeing a lot of innovation in terms of the design here but as i said in the intro if it ain't broke don't fix it and i think the design and build quality of the m9 is one of the empty of your one series uh entirely is one of its selling points and that's something that people have really grown to love i appreciate so i agree with them it's a great design it'd be nice if they perhaps trim the bezels a touch more but aside from that it's a solid looking phone really really nice and i think the only thing that looks a little odd is how the tops edge is almost entirely taken by the ir blaster for controlling your tv for example it has quite a pleasant smooth texture to it but um it if you compare it to the galaxy s6 which has a very very small ir emitter right here it does seem a bit odd that they've taken up the entire top edge with it but obviously that doesn't really matter who's going to be looking at the top but on the whole a very very good looking phone i think probably one of my favorite looking devices it's um comparable from my friends have said to the iphone 6 in terms of just how premium and high class it is and i promise very soon i will stop shimmering this in the light but it's uh it is quite nice to look at so let's move on to the display and this section won't take that long because it's not really a lot different we still have a five inch 1080p display which gives it 441 pixels per inch so it's reasonably sharp you're not really going to see pixels or anything and it's the same lcd 3 technology that they've used on the m8 before it's reasonably bright at 508 nits but uh it's a little poor compared to the galaxy s6 and iphone 6 which you can see in this little picture here so it's still a 1080p and well some will say that that's a bad thing because other phones like the lg g3 galaxy s6 and the galaxy s6 edge all have what they call qhd screens so that's 1440 by 2560 resolution beyond full hd essentially resolution screens um others say that well you don't really notice the improvement it's going beyond what people can see and it's an and sort of unnecessary drain on the battery because obviously the displays do take up a lot of battery and it's one of the biggest components for battery usage so uh whatever camp you're in it's up to you all i'll say is that the screen is pretty much the same as the m8 and also very very similar to the m7 1080p still the colors are nice it's uh unlike the samsung phones it's quite a a natural almost nor not almost cool but not i wouldn't just go as far as describing it as cool temperature it's not too garish or anything it's a solid display viewing angles are reasonable but they sort of fall behind the touch of the device as you can see there as i uh turn this to a bit of an acute angle you can see that the viewing angles aren't spectacular but they're they're pretty good and then that's in brighton days this uh struggles a touch perhaps compared to the competition but it's still all around a very solid screen so the final thing to say about the fact that this isn't qhd um i i'm still in the camp that qhd isn't really necessary on a phone especially this size is only five inches and it would just offer almost 600 ppi ridiculous pixel density so now the argument against qhd is that obviously is battery draining although to the extent it is is debatable but as we'll go on to later the battery doesn't really uh impress that much so we're not seeing a great deal of benefit as a result of not going for the qhd screen so it's another example of the m9 just being sort of more of the same from htc it's uh perhaps there are subtle improvements and if we and if you compare it side by side perhaps you'll see very slight changes but overall the display is as good as we expect it's the same as before and it's you know perfectly good and uh quite enjoyable to use so let's get into something a little bit more meaty and talk about the performance of the one m9 inside we have qualcomm's latest snapdragon 810 chip which is a 64-bit octa-core chipset up from the snapdragon 801 in the m8 alongside that we've got three gigabytes of ram again up from two in the m8 and inside we have 32 gigabytes of built-in storage with a micro sd port which supports up to 128 gigabyte card so that's really really good on the storage front but a good base amount of internal storage and also an excellent amount of expandable memory so we're in a world where we're seeing fewer and fewer flagships phones phones offering expandable memory i'm glad to see that htc is has stuck with it and we can enjoy some very large capacities so how fast is it well it's very very smooth it's fast everything works well like it plays all the games and apps i throw at it i'll jump into a couple of games in a second to show you and a combination of the sense 7 ui which is what the software is running on top of android here and a combination of that with the latest snapdragon chip and also three gigs of ram means that everything is really snappy really nice to use and uh you're not gonna notice any lag or response issues at all it's very very fast i always like to start with just looking at a benchmark or two uh whether you appreciate this benchmark result is up to you but i'll show you in anyway and on the antutu benchmark we see a score of 52 343 which is pretty impressive although it doesn't quite uh match the new xls processors in the samsung phones but again take with pinch of salt and uh it's obviously not really necessarily indicative of user experience how a phone scores in a benchmark but what i will say is that i've and i did a video on this is that there's been some issues or some news that perhaps the snapdragon 810 inside sort of throttles a bit as it overheats as it uses sort of intensive apps i put that to the test and i ran this benchmark about seven times and i did notice a drop in score from what we have here at about 50 to 52 000 down to about 43 44 000 so it shows that perhaps there is a bit of throttling but it's fairly minor um and i suppose when we're talking about that it is a whether it's a direct result of overheating i'm not sure i have to go test further but this does definitely get quite warm obviously this is a metal i believe aluminium body and so conducts heat well off the chip but as a result you can therefore feel it in your hand and it can become a little uncomfortable in terms of how warm it is obviously now that's just me running benchmarks over and over uh this is less noticeable in the real world but if you are playing a really intense app like modern combat 5 or real racing 3 which will i'll show you in just a second then you will notice that uh just around here it gets quite warm and you'll perhaps want to be changing the grip every now and then to cool it down so on you know on the plus side it's keeping the chip cool because it's dissipating through the metal body on the other hand it's you know you're feeling it so it's not hot it's just noticeably warm and there is a minor reduction for throttling in speed as a result of this i assume temperature gain so but it's not something you'll really see in the real world you may lose a frame or two in games but you won't really notice so that's the issue about throttling and overheating go and check out my website now i've written a uh feature on it it's not really something most people will notice or even realize but so uh except for me telling you now so beyond the benchmarks let's uh play some games i like to show you mon combat and real racing i think they're both pretty good looking games both quite intensive and although to be fair in most of my reviews recently pretty much every phone does run them well it's good just to prove that uh whatever whatever phone we're looking at can run the latest and greatest and most intense intensive games so you also have you have peace of mind that uh anything you throw at it will run well and it'll be fairly future-proofed now of course the benchmarks do say that although the samsung is a bit faster uh this is the fastest uh chip available on the market from qualcomm and sort of therefore probably the second fastest uh chip in the world for smartphones so uh you shouldn't be into any illusion that this isn't going to handle everything you throw at it perhaps the loading times and the frame rate is slightly less perhaps than the samsung phones but this is absolutely brilliant in itself and uh perhaps only side by side would you even notice that so as you can see it uh runs flawlessly it's uh i would yeah it's uh it's good to use everything is it's not getting too warm yes just yet although that does take a few minutes to kick in sometimes but uh overall nice and fast as you can see here frame rates nice and smooth responsive no really hints of lag or stutter so where it handles that nice and well so let's move on and jump into real racing three let's i'll fast forward this so uh we can jump right into the gameplay so you can see just how smooth it is so there we are it does take a fairly decent amount of time to load but we're in now so let's have a look at how it runs and you can see that it runs quite nicely now i will say that it's not got quite the frame rate perhaps that i would have expected um i've just finished reviewing the s6 and i do appreciate this as the htc review and this isn't a comparison video but it's you know you can't take a phone in a vacuum you have to look at it in terms of the competition as well and i'm noticing that the frame rate is a touch lower it's not quite as silky smooth but this is a very intensive app and uh not and doesn't represent um the fact that it's a touch slower in terms of frames so the general user interface it's only when you do throw intensive heavy games like this that you perhaps notice a bit of a drop in frame rate but it's um still you know more than playable it's really enjoyable to use and if you do purchase the htc one m9 then you'll you can throw anything you want in it and it'll run it well so um performance absolutely solid not market leading but excellent nonetheless now moving on from performance as i mentioned earlier it's not just about the hardware it's the combination of hardware and software that creates a good uh smooth responsive user interface and the sense 7 ui which is the htc skin on top of android which is running 5.0.2 here has been a really excellent selling feature of the one series since the m7 sense is uh it's not there's no there's not much bloatware it's responsive it's smooth it's fast and i'm just a fan of all of oh the settings menu is sort of really easy to grasp some other devices make it quite complicated everything is nice and simple and smooth and you've got no problems at all with it so one of the key things with sense is that you do get what they call blink feed if you go to the left of the home screen you can disable this if you like but i quite like it it's a flipboard esque news feed and other devices from other companies have sort of mimicked this and the success of the blinkfeed on the one series so you can you know add in your twitter feed your facebook get news updates and etc and i quite like it i still think it's the best implementation of a news feed and use board as flipboard as i say like um experience on a device i think they did it first and they still do it best so a combination of that and the general smoothness that which is carried over from previous devices which were you know they were flawlessly smooth as well um is really great now as i say it is smooth generally and you're gonna you know have any problems but there's a few areas that perhaps you do see a bit of a slowdown for example if you go to the menu where you can see your recent apps you can close them individually or you can press the x at the top to close them all let me just open a few more to add a few in the background like so now if you go to it as i say you can close them individually like that but the x takes just a few seconds to close them all as you can see it's it sort of becomes twice that long if you do have quite a few apps in the background and having used other phones recently as i say uh there's sort of no lag or uh loading time there so it's just one of those things where you notice there's a bit of a slowdown i'll come onto the camera later where there's a bit of a slowdown in hdr processing which is a little bit annoying but beyond those two sort of things on the whole it's very very fast and responsive so what's new with the m9 well not a great deal as i say it carries on the nice simple easy to use smoothness of uh that we're used to with scents but the two biggest new features are what they call locally localization based icons uh which to be fair i'll i doubt people will really use but also the slightly more interesting themes so uh basically the localization just means that depending on where you are your phone will uh you know follow you attract you with either gps or wi-fi and then you'll change your home screen settings or your um sorry icons to perhaps the office or perhaps to work and it takes a minute or two to set up and to be fair i just don't see anyone really using it obviously each to their own of course um but for me much more interestingly is the themes so let me show you that let's jump into that and what that means is if you don't like the uh default layout the default fonts and backgrounds you can download a few and you can also make your own perhaps if you've taken a picture um you can use that as a base for a theme the phone will pick out the colors and the uh sort of just the the theme essentially of that image and um spread it over your phone so i've downloaded a few let me give you an example i don't know this one called tilt which is a very dark very black design takes a few seconds and we have a quite different looking device you can see it goes as far as changing the icon style we've got circles now um the app drawer it's very very dark and black and it's quite interesting so let's try another one let's go back to themes and excuse me i and download to do another one which one did i go for i thought city look quite nice so let's apply that it takes a couple of seconds and so the biggest change obviously is just the background they can do stuff with icons this one doesn't appear to be a huge uh change from the uh normal theme but it's essentially an extended uh background extended wallpaper that spreads just a bit beyond just the uh wallpaper as i say so it's pretty nice uh you can see similar things on the new galaxy phones as well but uh i think the implementation from hd is a bit better and also the uh current the number of themes available is substantially more than the competition so if you're one of those people who want to uh create a new theme create uh your own very personalized phone then i think that's gonna be something you'll use um now and then and it's quite an interesting feature but on the whole i think it's interesting that i am spending so much time discussing uh you know app icons and uh wallpapers because there's not a great deal new in sense 7 with the m9 and obviously the m8 and i believe msm will also enjoy that update so these features won't just be unique to this device it's again it's a minor upgrade there's a few bits and pieces that are new but it's more of the same and that again is no bad thing necessarily it runs really well and uh sense i've always been a fan of because it's so reliable apps don't crash very often at all and on the whole everything is nice fast and responsive so the final things i'll mention about the sense 7 ui and the overall operating system is there's a couple of neat features you can find in the options for motions and gestures so we go to settings and then scroll down to uh the display and gestures and scroll down again to motion launch gestures so it's very well hidden you can enable double tap to wake and sleep and i think quite usefully volume button to launch the camera so uh you know i can if i turn this off i can double tap it like so to wake it up in addition to that if you scroll up to personalize you can actually change what software icons appear on the bottom so if we go to change navigation buttons you can add in auto rotate turn the screen off our navigation bar which i think is quite interesting so if you say you might want to turn that on you get extra button here and you can hide it like so and you can pull it up so i think that's one thing i i quite like i'm not sure whether i want to keep it on the uh bar here if i say you can make it a uh a widget on the home page but the fact that some people don't like the fact that software buttons do take up some of the screen real estate the fact that you can add in a uh button to get rid of that and add in you know get your screen back essentially is quite a nice feature now let's move on to the camera and this is where it gets a little bit more interesting i think the camera is the biggest change the biggest uh i'm not hesitating to say improvement at this stage but the biggest difference for sure in the new m9 so as i say the ultrapixel camera which we see on the m7 and m8 which was hyped to be good in low light and it was pretty decent it was good but did fall down against the competition i agree that megapixels are not everything it comes down to a lot more than that software sensor size the aperture etc but the ultra pixel was good and was marketed essentially for being good in low light and so sensibly i think they've moved it from the back to the front so now the front-facing camera or the selfie camera is that ultra pixel camera so now on the back we have a 20 megapixel camera and it's flanked by a dual led flash and supports up to 4k video recording now and also 1080p60 although i still recommend just keeping it on normal full hd which is 1080p 30. one thing it's lacking is optical image stabilization we're seeing that as a feature on more and more phones these days so it's a bit of a shame that we don't see it on there and that's not really the only feature that suffers a bit it does offer hdr mode as most phones do these days but it's not the best in terms of the uh what sort of picture it creates and also it's a bit slow if i go into the settings here turn on hdr you can see that it takes a good few seconds to process the shot and i don't i hate to mention the competition again but some of some new phones um can do that instantly pretty much so there's a bit of a delay there and it's not just the delay that's the issue i've took a couple of pictures one with and one without hdr to show you the difference and it is interesting just exactly what hdr does do and this is a picture of me i was scripting or writing some notes for this review and i thought i'll just take a picture of myself with it and also this is the picture with it with hdr on and as you can see it's far from a natural picture it is certainly a difference i'm not sure it's particularly better it does brighten up the dark areas you can see that the grass in the corner which was created by a shadow is has more detail you can see more of it so that's fair it does brighten things up but what it does to my face and just the overall brightness and color temperature of the photo i'm not a fan of i think it uh ruins it a bit it makes me look like i've got the sun in my face so it's loaded process and doesn't produce great results so we haven't got ois the hdr mode is not great and um it's just sort of not a great start for the camera now obviously the camera is one thing i really did want to be improved on this the m7 and m8 were good but decent with the ultra pixel but i've been i've been crossing my fingers that htc would come up with something new and sort of fix it make it you know in the same league as the other phones on the market and unfortunately it's not it's a bit average um there is an update expected for this which is supposed to improve the rear camera only quality but i'm reviewing this as is and i think that's fair now i went to the gadget show live in birmingham england a week or so ago i don't know if any of you saw my video on that and i had the htc one m9 as my phone for that day so let's go through a few pictures which i took now uh first off this is um a picture of a press room where i was uh networking obviously and mingling with my fellow ugly uh journalists and as you can see it's a decent picture there's nothing you know particularly interesting about it but um if you zoom in you sort of the quality isn't there so it's on the face of it it's a decent picture lighting is is good and the colors are natural but as soon as you start to zoom in you do see that a lot of quality and detail which is actually what really the uh ultra pixel camera suffered with it was when you zoomed in you didn't you could see the lack of detail so move on i did a selfie here so this is a look at the front-facing camera i don't know if anyone watches the gadget show uh tv program which airs on channel 5 in the uk this is one of the presenters a a very nice man called mr john bentley and i was lucky enough to have quick snap a quick selfie of the two of us and although i don't judge the colors here because it was a purple stage you can see that this is an example of the ultrapixel camera which is supposed to be good in low or difficult light i was a bit disappointed by it as a camera and i found in my use of the ultrapixel camera that it's just still as perhaps as bad as i remember um so we've got a new technology a new kind of camera on the back we've got the old sort on the front and unfortunately neither are particularly good they're absolutely fine they're capable if i go into this uh picture with um this is a nice man called leon doyle he was a former runner up on the apprentice in the uk selling his great product the wi-fi plug i'm not being paid to say that i just thought it was a decent product and you can see that the camera you know it is fine everything's fine and on the face of it it colors it decent and combined with the natural color reproduction of the lcd 3 display that we have on the htc everything looks quite natural nothing's oversaturated or overly vivid which i do like and i do appreciate i'm getting the impression that it's a capable phone uh a capable camera but it doesn't really stand up to the competition that well and you can see here i've took a picture of my camera setup for the show and it looks you know it's focused on the dslr obviously and that looks you know fairly good but again as soon as you zoom in the text on the camera is is blurry it's it's not particularly sharp and they almost haul the background rather than getting a really nice depth of field effect you're getting blown out white so you're getting um blur and whether that's a result of the lack of optical image stabilization or just other issues i don't know but you're not getting a particularly pleasant photo overall let's give it another chance so i took this to a national trust park here in the uk it's called stower head in wiltshire i believe it's a very beautiful place if anyone's seen the colin firth adaption of pride and prejudice you may recognize it uh i doubt many of you will especially since 90 i think of my audience is male but it's a beautiful place nonetheless and this is another example of how the hdr mode makes everything unnaturally bright you can see here the difference in the exact same picture with one with and one without hdr i think you can see immediately which one has hdr and it just creates a i'm not going to say bad picture it's just very different and very unnatural i think is the best way of describing it so but moving on this picture of this of the grass looks it looks nice it's reasonably detailed reasonably crisp colors are good and i think that's the one good thing we are seeing is that colors are natural colors are nice they're they're vibrant but they're not too punchy and i think that's perhaps one of the best parts of it but as we go through whites are often blown out it can't really take good dynamic range of photos because i can't really utilize the hdr because it creates these really weird pictures so um we're getting sort of skies are blown out and perhaps dark foregrounds so on the whole i think it can be summed up by saying that it's it lacks detail it lacks clarity and sharpness it's got good color reproduction a good color temperature but a poor hdr mode no ois and generally just a you know a lack of features perhaps means it's a bit of an average camera but and this this is also visible as on the video side of things as well as i say this takes up to 4k video now but if i show you a video it's decent it um is a bit jittery i'm actually sitting down at this point so it should be very very little in terms of uh judder or um what's the opposite of smoothness um but you know colors are reasonable as i say that's what's coming across often but it's just a bit disappointing that uh the one thing that i really wish that htc would improve on they've not so much improved on just changed for an equally not brilliant camera so um this is one of the areas that is disappointing and will be capable for most will be functional for most but when compared with the competition out there it does fall behind quite substantially unfortunately but finally talking about the camera it does have a couple of features something called zoe which uh if i didn't want to use the one series phone sims the m7 you'll you'll know about it sort of takes a whole lot of stills and then puts them into a burst to almost to create a video image it's been expanded now you can find friends on it it's become a bit of a social networking hub it seems for htc i'm not sure who would actually use it in that way but what you can do is even if you didn't take the pictures when you did take the pictures in zoe mode you can add them in to a zoe mode so you can get a bit of a a movie or a bit of a video of your images so if i uh perhaps put these pictures of the gadget show thing on into a bit of a list you can see how this works like so so it's quite neat it sort of is a shortcut just you know it avoids editing if you want to do that um i'm not sure you necessarily want to use their default sounds and music but you can change it so it's a nice little feature which is fair and also in the camera in terms of talking about features you can add more modes uh obviously we have the selfie mode for the front normal for the back and pretty stunning panoramas and interestingly that's about it but you can download more if i go to add there's uh well a couple more to download if you want to uh expand the feature list of the camera inside we've got a 2840 milliamp hour battery which is uh 240 milliamps uh more than the m8 so we're expecting a bit of a better battery life and i think we do see a slight improvement over the m8 but on the whole it's still very average i ran the geekbench rundown test which is a good indicator of how long the battery is essentially you can see that it took three hours and 38 to run down from 100 to zero percent now that number doesn't necessarily mean anything to you but if i were to say that the galaxy s6 uh took 5 hours and 50 to do the same thing in the exact same test it does set alarm bells ringing now i think that's a bit severe i don't think my experience in in actually using the phone does represent that huge gap that huge uh difference there but what i will say is very similar to the camera the battery life is quite average um it's a bit disappointing for a flagship and especially as i mentioned in terms of the display without the quad hd screen we're not getting a benefit of a sharper screen here perhaps at the expense of battery no there's no qhd screen it's just a bit of a okay battery life so as with most devices and as is in the case with this you'll get a day out of it a solid day but you'll be sort of down to about 20 maybe 25 at late evening if you have a normal walking down a day out of it obviously everyone's use is different but i expect it to uh you know we have to charge it overnight and although this does offer fast charging um it's a bit weird that you need to have a special cable for that which they don't bundle with it you have to go and buy one separately so that does increase the speed of the charge if you were to go and buy one a fair bit it promises htc promise zero to sixty percent in about half an hour uh i tested this it took about in that time it only got to about 35 percent but it's still better than default charging speed and mitigates a little bit the very average battery life but there's no wireless charging or anything it's just uh quick charging but you do have to go and buy a bit of an accessory for that and also as we're used to with most phones these days there are a power saving and ultra power saving mode which the ultra basically just makes it a very basic phone and messaging device but will give you days of battery essentially so i will say that you'll probably be getting used to putting saver mode on quite a bit to extend the longevity of the m9 as it's uh not great so again it's not bad and this is i can hear myself repeating my the same adjectives in terms of the battery as i did with the camera it's not bad it will do it's fine unless you put it side by side with other devices you know maybe not even realize it's not brilliant but it's not brilliant it's solid it's decent it's average it's uh not perhaps what i'd hoped for out of a 550 plus pound um flagship from htc especially given how little innovation we're seeing elsewhere as i say there's no qhd screen here to blame it on the last couple of areas have been a little bit critical the camera the battery they've been a bit disappointing but one thing that is still excellent and still class leading is the sound quality the m9 uses the stereo boom sound speakers which have been excellent ever since the m7 and in addition to that have implemented some software from dolby which uh gives it either a slightly more surrounding surround sound experience but also a punchier better richer experience now you can go into the settings and change uh what you want like what you would like dolby software to do personally i quite like the theater mode it adds a bit of a scale perhaps to my to my music so let me show you i put some spotify on just quickly um hopefully i don't compromise any license issues so let me show you what this software actually does to the sound so in the settings at the moment i have music mode enabled on the double surround setting so if i play a bit of tom petty i'll shut up and you can hear the difference up so you can hear that the theater sound setting gives an extra bit of volume gives a bit of punch to the music and i actually quite like having the theater mode on and it makes for me the m9 the best phone um on the market essentially for listening and playing music from thanks to the stereo speakers which are really loud except as i say wouldn't go quite to max volume but they're loud they're punchy they're bassy and also the extra derby audio which to me is one of the hidden more hidden but the best features of the new m9 is the the theater mode uh for me although you may prefer the music mode does add a little bit of something for my music and i listen to quite a bit of music and it's not just the loudspeakers it's effects it'll also affect your headphones and bluetooth headsets so sound quality sound volume is really uh best in class for the htc so it's nice to come from having being a bit disappointed as i say about the camera and the battery life to having such a really key selling feature here of sound finally in terms of call quality uh it's just as good as the sound quality i'm pleased to say thanks to active noise cancellation from a dedicated mic uh it's definitely above average in terms of call quality and puts the competitors like the s6 which i noted have to have pretty average to almost poor core quality to shame the htc really is a lot better in that regard just for simply making calls which uh you know for a smartphone one of the most fundamental features is to get it you know to get right is to offer a good um phone a good call a good audio quality and this really does it well so it's no surprise that thanks to these speakers and the software and the noise cancelling mic that it achieves very good call quality but it is uh one of those extra little things that although perhaps isn't the most important feature anymore on our smart on our smartphones i'm glad that htc has got right in conclusion i really wanted to like the m9 more it's a shame that a combination of a fairly poor camera average battery life and overall just a bit of a lack of innovation this year means that for the fact that it's such a high-end flagship and expensive phone there's just not a great deal to be impressed about on the m9 something that we haven't already been impressed with on the m7 or m8 but it still has a great design albeit being a bit chunky it still has really great speakers best in class and a combination of the snapdragon 810 and sense 7ui means it's a really smooth and responsive user experience the m9 is certainly a solid phone and htc has a bit of a underdog status you also want them to do well but you can't review these smartphones in a vacuum you have to consider them in a sort of real world competitive market and when you compare this side by side with for example the galaxy s6 or s6 edge the m9 does fall behind a bit so it's a good smartphone but it does suffer from a bit of a lack of innovation this year and also extremely strong competition so that's been my in-depth review of the htc one m9 i hope you've enjoyed it if you'd like to find out more check out the techjack.com and follow me on twitter at the tech chat please subscribe guys it really helps and you can keep up to date with my latest videos but there's nothing more than to say thank you very much for watching and hopefully see you again soon cheers guys you\n"