Gadgetory

as the smartphone market matures the differences from year to year will get finer and finer for HTC fans on the one m9 has enough change to warrant an upgrade to the HTC 10 I'm Juan Carlos bag now for Pocket now and we're going to see if this is a worthy one-year upgrade so much of HTC's focus for 2016 seems to be righting the wrongs of the past the 10 represents a company buckling down and delivering on all of the fronts where we expect them to excel looking at the build and design the m9 featured a 5-inch 1080p display while the HTC 10 moves us to a 5.2 inch quad HD screen this increase was balanced against losing the larger front speakers on the m9 the 10 only grows about two millimeters taller and wider while the m9 remains 1/2 millimeter thicker pretty much all the way around each phone the 10 improves on its predecessor the sharp rim running around the sides is gone the sharp bottom edge is gone the hardware buttons are not only better defined but also have a more satisfying click to their operation the 10 is another iteration of this design language improved since the 1m 7 yet this somehow feels like a more impressive jump than what we saw moving from the m8 to the m9 we do see a little feature swap losing the IR blaster from the m9 means we can no longer use our phones as universal remotes but we do gain a terrific fingerprint sensor unlocking the 10 via this hardware home button is much handier than the lift up phone and double tap screen function which has always personally bugged me on HTC s what if I want to turn on my screen while my phone is flat on my desk HTC and speaking of screens while we move up to a higher resolution display we seem to do so with no impact on performance that we can find many in our comments will debate the merits of having a higher pixel density beyond 1080p in the screen size but it doesn't seem to come with any appreciable downside and it will improve the experience for those wanting to play around with some VR applications in real world use both screens are bright enough to handle outdoor situations to my eye the 10 looks to be ever so slightly brighter than the m9 but the differences here are slight and neither phone will unseat as am some AMOLED display in direct sun looking at software HTC Sense skin is back again it's a sleek clean UI bringing some of the feel of stock Android while including extra organization options to elements like the app drawer folks moving from the m9 to the ten will find a familiar interface the major change in software this year seeing HTC whittled down a few of the apps that used to provide which would compete with Google services there's no gallery app for example picture and video duties are handled by Google Photos performance is another happy improvement in short bursts the Qualcomm 810 in the m9 is snappy and powerful but even after some software updates this chip still runs hot literally reaching temperatures which could be uncomfortable in pants pockets multitasking situations in prolonged you suffered lags and stutters which are now absent in the HTC 10 brevity benefits gaming on the m9 but even after a single mission in implosion the phone is already warm to the touch and we see a lot more stuttering and dropped frames in future fight than on the HTC 10 moving to photography HTC keeps most of what we liked about the m9 s camera app and does so without ever completely removing you from your composition window while we keep the great manual photo controls we lose the post-processing options for controlling saturation contrast and sharpness when creating a JPEG output from the ten is generally better all around you lose some resolution to gain back those ultra pixels but it's a fair compromise for better low-light performance and smoother video we'd be remiss if we didn't also say that selfie performance is better - thanks to optical image stabilization on that front shooter the one area where the m9 still scores a solid victories on speaker playback HTC split treble based solution on the 10 is novel and produces a nicely nuanced sound but media sounds fuller clearer and louder on the m9 headphone playback is very similar in that HTC continues to offer one of the best built-in amps available on any mobile device what does seem to have changed is how aggressive boom sound software alters the audio you listen to looking at a sound file with a sliding sine wave the original file has very even tapers but with boom sound engaged on the m9 we can see how much this software augments some frequencies of sound over others the 10 also juices this sound but not as severely the m9 processor runs hot even during fairly lightweight tasks and that has a noticeable impact on battery life the 10 also benefits by having a slightly larger battery built in a 3000 milliamp hour cell over the m9 s 2,850 milliamp hour cell running our media tasks streaming 30 minutes of HD video over Wi-Fi at 50% brightness the HTC 10 drains 6% of its battery while the 1 year old m9 drained 11% we have to temper these results by the relative ages of each phone but the 10 is simply a more efficient device and we can hypothesize it will age better over time the 10 also powers up faster than the phone of replaces benefiting from Qualcomm quick charge 3 standard 30 minutes on a fast charger will result in over a 40% charge the m9 only tops off around 28% in the same amount of time so let's wrap this up where does this leave us between the HTC One m9 versus the HTC 10 as mentioned in many of the comparisons we produce year-to-year upgrades are tricky recommendations often we see refinement but not a substantially better device moving from the m9 to the 10 is evolution not revolution but so much of this phone has been refined and improved design performance cameras battery life more than any other phone released in 2016 so far for folks on last year's HTC flagship the HTC 10 has quite a bit to offer on a one-year upgrade as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for our full coverage of the HTC 10 and hit that thumbs up button for a little extra positive reinforcement for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos now you can chat me up on Twitter and Instagram is some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video