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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invinciblegod - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
I guess you mean looks similar spec wise because it looks nothing like an S7 appearance wise (especially with that weird super chamfer).Meteor2 - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
HTC's software is far better than Samsung's. That alone puts it ahead of the S7.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
A surprising number of people *like* touchwiz for some unknown reason.darkich - Tuesday, September 27, 2016 - link
Multi window!It's by far the best multitasking you can find in any mobile platform, especially on the Galaxy Note devices, where it can basically intuitively, simply and easily do a pc-grade windowing without any issues.
Only thing it can't do is minimizing a game within a window (pointless anyway).
The other feature is screen minimizer which allows easy one handed usage for even the biggest phones.
Impulses - Thursday, September 22, 2016 - link
If I HAD to buy a device over the last six months I would've gone right for the 10, I think it was largely viewed as a totally viable alternative to the S7 by most objective eyes... I'm holding off for the smaller Pixel tho, hoping it doesn't disappoint.Never owned a phone anywhere near as long as I've owned this Nexus 5, and I'm still reluctant to go to a larger device (Sony Z3c is the only other phone to remotely tempt me besides the 10).
damianrobertjones - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Dear HTC,Why not try something different? Release 5 Windows Mobile 10 based handsets (Just after MS announces their Surface Phone).
It's worth a shot.
Murloc - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
the problem with that idea is that WP is dying.Nokia tried doing that and their phone business is currently dead.
WP10 even broke the lockscreen background-changing feature because it was made dependent on silverlight and then they killed silverlight.
Funnily enough, Edge and windows phone internet explorer don't even support silverlight.
The lack of mass market adoption killed app availability, most new apps don't support it, the big ones that do receive updates much later.
Google made sure that no decent youtube app is available too.
ToTTenTranz - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Every single windows phone from the last 10 years has resulted in millions of losses but you think the next one is going to work out well because...?eSyr - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
It would be nice to have comparison to m8 also, since many m8 owners just skipped m9.Badelhas - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
I agree. I am still rocking the M8 and love it.Great review, though!