The HTC 10 Review
by Joshua Ho on September 19, 2016 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
Battery life is still one of the most important aspects of any mobile device, and as a result our testing of a mobile device needs to properly emphasize this aspect. As a result, it’s important that every device is tested in the same manner to avoid bias in one way or another. In order to achieve this, all devices have all possible background services disabled, as well as sync and automatic app updates. In order to try and make an even comparison we also set the display to 200 nits brightness on a 100% average picture level display, also known as a blank white screen. However, one area that we aren’t necessarily able to control for 100% of the time is ambient temperature, device orientation, or material contact. While tests that don’t reach TDP limits won’t see any effects, TDP-limited tests will see a delta here, but it’s hard to estimate just how much of an impact exists here. While we might be able to do some power characterization, in most cases review units are not allowed to be torn down and with a general decrease in the number of devices with removable batteries power characterization has to be done through the fuel gauge which is often unreliable. With the HTC 10, this fuel gauge is only updated every minute so there’s realistically no way to actually test power outside of full rundown tests.
In our first test we can see that the Galaxy S7 is actually slightly down on power efficiency relative to the HTC 10. I went back and ran the HTC 10 on our basically display-bound battery life test and the Galaxy S7 gets around 12.34 hours while the HTC 10 gets 11.63 hours. That’s about a 5-6% delta which is almost entirely down to display efficiency, so I suspect that the difference here is actually due to optimizations in DVFS and other optimizations that would probably fall under the “PowerBiotics” branding that HTC seems to be using here.
Moving on to the LTE version of this test we can see that HTC has really done an amazing job of implementing their cellular solution as battery life is basically identical to what it is on WiFi. It’s likely that poor reception conditions will tilt the scales back towards WiFi but in areas of good reception the HTC 10 has relatively good battery life on LTE. This is probably compounded by the fact that the HTC 10’s LTE reception is actually significantly above anything else I’ve used in recent memory including the LG G5 and Galaxy S7.
In the interest of trying to see whether this sort of pattern holds across the board, PCMark is another test that emphasizes power consumption but rather than just web browsing it attempts to have a mix of CPU and GPU usage in general purpose tasks as well as some general purpose IP blocks like video decode. While a relatively small part of overall power consumption, storage power consumption is also a part of the test as things like the photo editing subtest will involve reading and writing to non-volatile storage.
Interestingly enough, the HTC 10 ends up being slightly behind the Galaxy S7 here. Again, it’s likely that we’re looking at the difference in display power here as the Galaxy S7’s 1440p AMOLED display has a lower subpixel density and in a few tests the average picture level is relatively low. HTC is also using an ever so slightly larger display which would tilt the scales as well. Of course, none of this really changes the fact that display-bound workloads are going to see the HTC 10 performing worse than the Galaxy S7, but from an academic perspective it’s interesting to keep tabs on how AMOLED and LCD compare in terms of efficiency. It goes without saying that the Galaxy S7 edge with its huge battery easily pulls away from the HTC 10 and pretty much anything on the market but if you want a phone usable with one hand I would argue that the Galaxy S7 edge isn’t really a one-handed phone.
Moving on to the sustained rundown tests we can take a look at how an OEM has chosen to optimize their thermal management strategies, which often vary from device to device despite similar SoC and design. While we used to run Basemark OS II and GFXBench for this part of the test due to the arguably misleading results that Basemark OS II provides we’ve dropped it entirely to improve the signal to noise ratio of our reviews.
In GFXBench’s Manhattan ES 3.1 infinite rundown again we’re seeing the differences that come from display efficiency deltas but the difference is so small because SoC is pretty much the dominating factor when a display of this size will consume about a watt and the TDP-limited power consumption of the SoC is about two watts. What is noteworthy here is that HTC tends to do a better job of throttling the SoC such that the degradation is graceful. Samsung and LG both seem to favor maximizing short term performance which results in underdamped behavior which actually has a pretty appreciable impact on things like VR performance although given that no OEM is shipping Daydream-ready devices yet it isn’t necessarily critical for an OEM to be getting throttling right.
Overall, HTC does manages to pull in fairly respectable battery life despite being down on display efficiency. Our new tests manage to highlight the surprising level of optimization that HTC has put into the 10, but in use cases where you can’t really optimize things like cellular connectivity or governor behavior the HTC 10 slightly trails the Galaxy S7. When compared against something like the Galaxy S7 Exynos 8890 variants the HTC 10 is going to trail in anything CPU-bound as Kryo is just not as efficient as Exynos M1 for whatever reason. I don’t really think it’s a fair comparison but the Galaxy S7 edge is undoubtedly a big step up in battery life relative to the HTC 10, but this comparison only makes sense if you are willing to deal with the larger 5.5 inch display.
While I hate using screen-on time as a metric for battery life, generally speaking where the One M7 got about 3-4 hours of constant use when new the HTC 10 seems to achieve about 6 hours of use or so which is much more than what the 30% bump in battery capacity would suggest, especially once you factor in the half inch difference in display size, so the efficiency benefits of newer SoCs like the Snapdragon 820 are absolutely noticeable.
Charge Time
While battery life is probably the single most important metric of a mobile device, it’s important to not forget that these devices still need to spend at least some time wired up, whether directly in the form of an AC adapter or indirectly by swapping batteries. As a result it’s important to see how quickly the device’s battery will charge as generally speaking end users don’t hotswap batteries and charging the phone’s battery with an AC adapter is the dominant use case where charge time matters. To test this we use a number of methods, but for this review we will rely on measurements from the wall and using the time it takes for the device to drop to a certain level of power draw from the wall to indicate a full charge state, which is generally quite close to the time it takes for the device itself to indicate 100% but may take longer depending upon how an OEM adjusts battery state of charge determination and presentation.
It turns out that the HTC 10 charges fairly quickly, but it’s not necessarily as fast as what something with QC 2.0. This might seem counter-intuitive but realistically it’s not supposed to be faster than QC 2.0, but to reduce battery and device heating to better preserve the battery over time. Regardless, pretty much anything that charges in under 2 hours is going to be fairly comparable here. The Galaxy S7 does charge faster, but at the cost of overall battery lifetime. The LG G5 is actually slightly slower to charge here, so all things considered the HTC 10 is doing pretty well here. The one notable winner here is the OnePlus 3, which seems to charge quickly with relatively low battery heat due to its proprietary Dash Charge system.
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MobiusPizza - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Gosh that sentence is quite a mouthful
asfletch - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Agreed. Also re the content - is it surprising to anyone else that UFS solutions don't have a clearer advantage over eMMC? I mean my 2014 Note 4 gets about 19/7 on Random Read/Write with the same Androbench settings. According to these charts, that's better than the current Note 7. Also the HTC 10 here on test beats all of the UFS phones handily for Sequential Write speed.What's up with that? Is it the benchmark?
Guitahero - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
What happened with the deep audio analysis from anandtech?JKJK - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Indeed! I miss them too!winjay - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
"for its size I don’t believe there’s another Snapdragon 820 device with better battery life."Sony usually does wonders with battery life. Have you checked Xperia XA battery life?
Vagabondjonez - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
with a 2k display he probably meantwinjay - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Also this phone is said to have an amazing DAC. How is the audio output?Ro_Ja - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
The front looks like a Samsung Galaxy.amosbatto - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
This review (and every other review I have ever read) doesn't cover the most important issue, which is the longevity of the phone. Here are the issues which I suggest that a review should cover:1. We all know that the battery will die after 2 years. Every phone which has a replaceable battery should automatically get a higher rating, just because it will probably last longer than one which doesn't. If a phone has a sealed case, the reviewer should try to open the case and give readers an idea how hard it will be to replace the battery. If the case is glued together, if the battery is glued to the case or if it is impossible to buy replacement batteries on the internet, then the review should let us know.
2. Reviews should emphasize the amount of storage space a phone has and how expandable the phone is, because this has a big impact on how long the phone will last. If a phone is limited to 32 gigabytes of storage, then the phone will probably not last more than 2 years, because people tend to buy new phones once they run out of space. Trying to decide what apps to uninstall, what music to remove, what photos to delete, etc. is such a painful process, that many people simply buy a new phone. Reviews should really knock phones which don't have a MicroSD slot to expand storage and I would love to see some benchmarking on the difference in speed between the internal NAND and a normal MicroSD.
Frankly, I wish that smartphone manufacturers would offer us phones with two MicroSD slots, where one is used to expand the storage for apps on the phone and the second is the memory that we can remove to transfer files to our PC.
Another thing that reviews should cover is how hard is it insert and extract a MicroSD card. On my HTC Sensation from 2011, it was very easy to pop the MicroSD card in and out of the computer, but it can't be done without a special tool on my Moto X Pure Edition. Not a single review ever covers how hard it is to insert and extract the MicroSD card, but this is essential information for people like me who intend to keep their phones for many years.
3. Every review should mention how good the manufacturer is about offering security updates and OS upgrades to its phones, which are essential for extending the life of the phone. HTC has an excellent track record of offering fast updates when a new version of Android is released, whereas Samsung does not. Every review comparing an HTC phone to a Samsung phone should mention this difference, because it will influence the buying decisions of people who care about the longevity of their phones.
4. Another way to extend the life of a phone is to install an OS that doesn't come from the manufacturer. If the manufacturer stops offering upgrades, then we have the freedom to install CyanogenMod or another mod to get the new features in the latest version of Android. No review ever covers how hard it is to unlock the bootloader and install a mod in the phone, but this is essential information for a phone buyer who wants to be able to keep upgrading the phone. Does the manufacturer offer for free the code to unlock the bootloader and does it have a policy of voiding the warranty if a mod is installed? Five years ago when I bought my Sensation, HTC had the best mod policies in the industry, but I have no idea who is best today and this review didn't mention it.
Another piece of essential information is how standard the hardware is and how likely mods will be developed for the phone. For example, the SoC on the HTC 10 is a standard Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, so it is highly likely that mods will be made for this phone, whereas it is highly unlikely that mods will ever be created for a custom SoC made by Huawei, Samsung or Apple. Yes, that custom SoC probably processes a couple milliseconds faster, but frankly most people will never notice the difference.
5. Another way to extend the life of a phone is to turn it into a PC. I frankly don't see the point of buying a flagship phone like the HTC 10 which costs $600, but I might consider it if I know that it can be used as a low cost PC. Kudos to this review for at least mentioning that the HTC 10 supports Slimline and Android 7, but it doesn't explain why that is important. The phone has the necessary hardware and software to be hooked up to a monitor and bluetooth keyboard and mouse, so it can be used as a PC with multiple windows and a mouse pointer. I would have loved to read a review about how well this works with the HTC 10.
Reviewers spend an inordinate amount of time covering differences in processing speed and other minutiae which most people will never notice when using a phone, but they don't provide the most essential information to help people choose phones with long lifespans. Part of the reason is that reviewers are the type of people who get a new phone every year, so they don't worry about the battery wearing out. However, I think a more important factor is that fact that sites like AnandTech rely on advertising from the same manufacturers who they are reviewing. Manufacturers of smartphones and other electronic devices promote planned obsolescence as a way to increase their sales. A reviewer who dwells too much on the fact that a phone is designed to be thrown away after two years probably won't get much advertising and is unlikely to get free samples to review.
Apple has always had some of the worst policies in the industry in terms of planned obsolescence, but within the last 5 years the entire phone industry has started to copy Apple in designing sealed black boxes which are difficult to open and even harder to fix. Yet, I have not seen a single review of the iPhone 7 or any of the other recent smartphones which even mentions how hard it is to fix the phone or even replace the battery. If the reviewers don't mention it, then consumers won't think to check and the phone industry will conclude that consumers don't want fixable and modifiable phones, so they will offer more and more Apple-like devices.
Extending the life of smartphones is not just a way to save consumers money. One of the biggest ecological problems on the planet is the fact that 1.5 billion smartphones will be manufactured this year and most of them will be junked within 2 years. More smartphones are manufactured today than all the other ICT devices combined (servers, routers, desktop and notebook PCs, tablets, gaming consoles, cameras, televisions and advanced wearables). The amount of energy, metals and other vital resources which are wasted every year in making throwaway devices is astounding. If we estimate that the average smartphone and its charger weighs 150 grams, that means we are generating 225,000 metric tons of eventual e-waste every year, which is toxic and needs special treatment.
Even more alarming is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being generated to manufacture all these smartphones. Apple estimates that 83.6 kg of CO2-equivalent were emitted to manufacture and transport its iPhone 6 to point of sale, whereas using an iPhone for a year emits 3.5 kg CO2-e and recycling it at the end of its life emits 1.0 kg CO2-e. Of course, Apple didn't include all the energy to operate the cell towers, internet servers and routers, etc. that are used by an iPhone, but manufacturing a smartphone clearly has far more environmental impact than using it, so the best way to lower the environmental impact is to make the phone last as long as possible in order to avoid manufacturing a new phone.
Apple does not explain how it calculates its emissions, but it is highly likely that Apple did not include the SF6 which was emitted in manufacturing its screens or all the other types of greenhouse gases which often get overlooked. It also probably doesn't include in its emissions all the advanced processing to make the ultrapure chemicals, water and gases which are used in silicon and flat screen fabs. Today's crop of smartphones probably have an even higher environmental impact, considering that they are using larger screens, more memory and more processing cores than the iPhone 6, which had a 4.7in screen, 1 GB of RAM and 2 processing cores. Now-a-days, 5-6in screens, 2-4GB of RAM and 4-8 processing cores are the norm, so we can conservatively estimate that manufacturing today's smartphone will emit 100 kg CO2-e. For the 1.5 billion smartphones produced in 2016, that means 150,000 metric tons of CO2-e.
Allan_Hundeboll - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
You def. have a point