The HTC 10 Review
by Joshua Ho on September 19, 2016 8:00 AM ESTSystem Performance
One of the major areas worth discussing when it comes to mobile devices is computing performance. As much as OEMs try to not talk about this, ultimately what distinguishes a smartphone from a featurephone or simple flip phone is dramatically improved compute. Running a web browser, running a full Linux OS with apps that require JIT or AOT compilation are all tasks that demand large amounts of system memory and compute. Similarly, any kind of 3D game is going to require quite a bit of compute power and memory in general. As mentioned in previous reviews a major focus for this year has been trying to make our benchmarks more focused on real-world performance, so we’ll be better able to show how the HTC 10 actually performs relative to other devices on the market.
In the basic browser benchmarks, we can see that the HTC 10 is pretty much on par with all other Snapdragon 820 devices. This shouldn't really come as a surprise given how much of an optimization target all of these benchmarks are for the OEMs and SoC vendors, but performance in general on Snapdragon 820 is not necessarily great for web browsing with Chrome.
PCMark is very sensitive to DVFS changes in most cases so it's interesting to see how closely it performed to the Galaxy S7 and G5. What is notable here is the poor showing in video playback, which persists even if you use HTC's CPU cheats which are still accessible from the developer settings. The average scores that PCMark records is significantly higher than what I can achieve with the HTC 10 unless I enable high CPU performance mode. Determining what this means has been left as an exercise to the reader.
Looking at the HTC 10 overall results it might be tempting to simply suggest that overall performance is comparable to the Galaxy S7 with S820 but when you look at the individual breakdown the main reason why the HTC 10 seems to be so slow is because the location provider in Maps is causing its launch time to be significantly higher than most phones I've seen before. In just about every other situation the Galaxy S7 is significantly behind the HTC 10. Overall, I think the HTC 10 performance is in line with what I'd expect for a Snapdragon 820 phone here.
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Awful - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
This review is interesting insofar as it gives insight into what we might see coming from HTC in the new Pixel (Nexus) phones on Oct 4...so in some ways the timing isn't so bad. I gave up on 3rd party phones after the nexus 5...Impulses - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
Ditto.Fidelator - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Fantastic review, the HTC 10 is really as good as I hoped it to be, which is basically the top of the hill, I'm sure a lot of readers would appreciate a new Audio quality section on these reviews, of course, keeping some subjective comments on the speaker quality and listening experience, it's an important piece of what makes a device great.Definitely considering this as my next device
randomguy128 - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
What do you mean by featured review. Did HTC have to pay you guys to finally do this reviewvision33r - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Good phone 8 months ago. HTC failed to deliver a bigger size 10, fewer people in Asia buys phones smaller than 5.5" these days. Every Android OEM in China starts at 5.5" and work their way up to 6"Anakha - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Wow... Anandtech beat HTC South Africa. I had a bet with a friend on which would come first, the review on Anandtech or the release of the HTC 10 in South Africa. Sadly, we are still waiting for the 10 in South Africa and it got to the point where I said stuff it and upgraded my contract to the Huawei P9 Plus. I was really looking forward to the 10 but I just could not hold onto the M8 for any longer and needed something better. Hopefully next year HTC can launch on time...Vagabondjonez - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
awesome story manzeeBomb - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
That distillation starts at the name it seems as rather than the One M10 as you might expect given that the naming scheme for the past few generations has meant that its predecessors are called the One M8 and One M9.Wut
asfletch - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
I would just like to echo comments praising the review and disagreeing with the 'too late' sentiment. The 10 launched here in Australia at ~US$830 and is still around US$750 at major retailers. I wasn't at all sure it was worth so much, so I ended up going with a NOS Note 4 instead for half the price.Now I am armed with the confirmation I need that it's the phone for me (and knowledge that I want a Sharp rather than Tianma display version), I am happy to wait until it drops closer to $400 and my Samsung wears out. I like reading on 5.7" but I'll be happy to go back to 5.2 for my next phone for easier one-handed use.
PS if LG made a V20 mini I'd be all over it (no, the G5 is not that phone).
jtang97 - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
Only a small paragraph about the audio quality of the HTC 10? It always amazes me that a lot of sites when reviewing mobile PHONES do not talk about the audio quality. Sure, it might not be used for conversing with others so much anymore but it's still important.Also, I don't know what version you are using, but when I change the volume, the audio slider disappears after a few seconds. It has NEVER remained on the screen like you claim it does. Tapping on the screen after you moved the slider only makes the slider disappear faster.