Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm kV HD here and this is the HTC One m9 so last year we had the HTC One m8 and that was a really well built phone has some great fast software and a let down camera and so this year we have the one m9 which is a really well boat phone as great fast software and a let down camera so a little background here I've been using this one m9 as my daily driver on and off since Mobile World Congress so a couple of weeks now and yet I still kind of have a little bit of trouble telling a difference between it and the One m8 at least from the front without looking at it for a little bit that's because most of the changes with the one m9 are on the inside and for HTC you've probably heard this a thousand times were people talking about this phone it's a story of if it ain't broke don't fix it and there was not a lot wrong with the original one and eight so for the n9 there's you know a couple of small adjustments a couple of tweaks here and there and some small changes to make it better so this HTC One m9 from the front and the back is pretty similar looking to the m8 it's an all metal phone again but it's not unibody anymore so there's actually several pieces of metal being held together and along the sides you get that strip all the way around the phone that's a different color so on my gunmetal m9 that strip is rounded off and black but on the silver m9 that strip is a new piece of metal so it's a bit of a sharper edge and it's a gold accent and the metal is also now this brushed look and it's a little more glossy kind of making it a fingerprint magnet but also making it look a little more like jewelry in a way so you got a bit of a toss-up if you like that or not it's definitely still a slippery phone though so be warned I haven't installed a skin on mine yet but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up doing that just to make sure I never drop it HTC also moved of the power button from the top right hand side to the right hand side of the phone which is supposed to be in a more natural easier to reach spot for your thumb but unfortunately that's where the volume buttons already are so they put the power button underneath those and I think that was a bad move the power button is now too low and to this day I still haven't gotten used to it and it even if it's ridged and clicky and separated from the rest I constantly accidentally press the volume down button like all the time that they should have done is move the volume buttons over to the left and had that power button in a normal spot but the good thing goes you still have double tap to wake on the screen and you can even put a sleep-wake toggle in a software buttons if you want but yeah overall build quality and button placement was not broken so they had no need to overhaul it to fix it another thing that wasn't broken was the display and the One m8 had one of the best 1080p displays on any smartphone last year and we're seeing more quad HD displays this year from basically every manufacturer but HTC is sticking with their trusty 1080p and this LCD as much as I like pixels is still great it's very bright has great colors great viewing angles and everything and since it's still a 5-inch display the pixel density is still excellent so you won't be seeing any of the pixels from a normal viewing distance and that awesome display combined with the best speakers in any smartphone make for an awesome media experience whether you're gaming or watching YouTube videos or whatever you're doing boom sound is king and second place isn't even close now HTC did add this Dolby audio to the m9 which is essentially just a software toggle between two eq's music mode and theater mode music mode is best for most stuff I tend to leave it at that it's not distorted at all and it gets super loud and crispy and I love that a theater mode is interesting because it simulates a bit of a surround sound effect so it can be cool for videos or if you're watching a movie but it definitely distorts it a lot more so the build quality not broken the display not broken the speakers definitely not broken so onto the software and HTC has kept it nice and clean with sense 7 on this phone it's built on top of Android 5.0 - not sure when it's going to get the 5.1 update but I'll keep an eye out for that but this is now cleaned up to be actually one of my favorite Android skins that exists out there I still prefer stock Android but I used to really not like HTC Sense at all the same way I hated TouchWiz and now there are there still you know a couple parts of it I don't like the keyboard for example constantly infuriates me with this terrible autocorrect I hate the keyboard and the quick settings are still pretty ugly to me I don't know why I am is insist on skinning every little part of Android and the quick settings seems like the one I got away these just get uglier all the time but aside from stuff like that you know sense seven is a really neat skin blinkfeed is tidied up and of course still plugs into your social feeds and gives you up-to-date info and this is the first HTC one where I didn't immediately want to disable and remove blinkfeed although you totally can and also speaking of skins there's a whole theme engine built into HTC Sense now so if you really don't like the way it looks stock there are a ton of skins to pick from and apply that effect basically everything about the software and the UI from the launcher to the software buttons to the app drawer and even the quick settings so all the colors and all the theme look will be changed and the wallpaper too and you can grab one of these pre-existing themes or you can build your own theme from a wallpaper or an image and that is a legit way to customize your phone exactly as you want it like a boss and also it's Android so a lot of the other elements like the keyboard or like the launcher you can change those too if you don't like them there were a lot of other neat tricks built into this version of sense I liked you can change the multitasking app view to be either the cards which is what we're used to in most other versions of Android over the past few years or grid-view which is something that HTC sort of introduced with the one series that not everybody liked but now you have the choice which is a cool way of not exactly backtracking on that but I do prefer the card view and you also have these screen off gestures so we saw these in the last one - you can not only double tap to wake the phone and double tap again to sleep but there are also a bunch of other swipe Direction functions that you can learn and decide to use and actually enable individually if you want to use them I found a lot of these were just going off in my pocket with the last HTC One but I did keep the DoubleTap on because it didn't do that in my pocket so that's pretty cool and these also work very well with the dot view case - so that's a pretty baller combo and another thing they introduced is this home screen widget it's supposed to be a pretty smart thing where it knows you if you're at home it knows when you're at work it knows when you're out all this is from your GPS location and of course with every phone that's tried to guess where I work it thinks my school is where I work because I go there every day but it worked okay give me some decent productivity apps when I went to class and then when I came home and tried to get me to slack off and watch YouTube you know the usual constantly had these suggested apps too that weren't even installed on my phone not sure what that's about but yeah it just moved off to the second homescreen of mine and I just kind of left it there to do its thing and I explore once in a while but if you hated it more than I did you could easily remove it because it's just a widget so yeah the software experience here on the one m9 is great overall performance to which I talk about less and less in these reviews because they keep getting so good now is great three gigabytes of RAM Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 that power that thing it's basically a performance champ you see me navigating through it it's responsive animations are very short so everything is snappy and quick and I never really found an instance to get it to stutter or hold up it did get warm some people were asking if my m9 ever overheated it did get warmer than other phones I played with recently for sure especially when charging or using with the screen on for a very long period of time but I never actually overheated like I had with some other phones like the g3 where it had you know limited functionality because of the heat the metal body this phone does get very warm to the touch when you're intensely gaming but generally it's actually nothing to worry about and the battery life has been decent actually the one m9 it gives you a really detailed breakdown of the battery usage in the software but it doesn't actually give you a screen on time so I felt like I was getting my usual three to three-and-a-half maybe four hours of screen on time but I couldn't actually see a number at the end of the day so I just go by the fact that I was ending the day with 15 to 20 percent battery left to tell that it was pretty good normal usage I had one weird anomaly day where it died early but overall battery life was pretty good now undoubtedly the biggest challenge HTC had when going from the One m8 to the m9 was the one part of the phone that people did consider broke that's the camera the HTC One m8 s biggest flaw last year was its back facing four megapixel or ultra pixel camera it was actually a bit of a downgrade from the m7 which had optical image stabilization so that was the biggest change of philosophy this time around as the one m9 has a 20 megapixel camera so ultra pixels are almost gone the front-facing camera actually is still a pretty decent ultra pixel selfie camera but now everyone is curious just how good is the slightly protruding 20 a pixel camera on the back of the m9 well it's still not that good and that's unfortunate because we all like to take pictures on our phones and normally it's not a problem or anything but this one is especially not good so 20 megapixels yeah that's nice that's great and everything pictures are sharper you have more detail than before but the camera here is a classic case of more megapixels doesn't always equal better pictures the main problem here is dynamic range so you know how you normally tap on the viewfinder to set the brightness of your photo whatever you tap it on it changes the auto exposure that's nice and quick and snappy on this phone and it's taking a picture is just as snappy too but it's almost never exposed correctly to get everything I want the dynamic range is terrible on this camera and as a result no matter how hard I try there's always something way overexposed and blown out or way underexposed and too in the dark like every photo I take has this problem so naturally I turn on HDR to try to get some high dynamic range stuff but the effect is kind of overly strong and doesn't look natural anymore and all of that combined with almost embarrassing 4k video that kind of looks like up scaled 720p ah it's just a frustrating cameraman and I wanted to be good so much now look there's been talks there's been talks about a software upgrade that could potentially make this better and usually that can happen but for this one I'm thinking it's the hardware I'm putting the blame on the hardware it really shouldn't be this bad and if you look it up most other high-end Android smartphones even the iPhone use a Sony sensor these things are tried-and-true and produce some spectacular images for some weird reason if Cece went with some random Toshiba built sensor and that would be where I place the blame it all kind of makes sense the poor dynamic range the washed out color even the best image processing probably can't save this one and I say that with regret because like I said I wanted it to be a lot better so overall as a package this one m9 is still a really good phone and for people coming from the 1m 7 the first HTC One this is going to be an awesome upgrade and for the one I made probably less of a critical one especially if you don't take a lot of photos if you do take a lot of photos long it's more fawning are used to having a good camera in your pocket this is sort of a hit or miss thing again some of the photos it takes can look pretty good but there are better Android camera experiences out there and the iPhone takes better pictures and some windows phones take better pictures so if you have cameras and photo and video taking high on your list of priorities when you're buying a smartphone 109s probably not at the top your list that being said like I said at the beginning of this video this is an extremely well-built phone with great fast software and that's what it's doing really really well here and it doesn't hurt that it has the best speakers on any phone period and also happens to have a gorgeous 1080p display so that's it for the one m9 if you enjoyed this video review feel free to leave a thumbs up below if you like that there's also a subscribe button below if you want to see more videos like this feel free to tap that and I'll talk to you guys in the next video bass