The final nail in the coffin for HTC. HTC One A9.

[Megatomic]

I think one location for all the discussion is beneficial, I think it will keep the information more in context and the discussion will be more coherent as a result. I think lol.

MY OPO battery drained fast after being updated to Lollipop the first time but afterwards was fine. Maybe your A9 will do the same.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I'll see what I can do. I don't think I've run a benchmark before, but it's just the GFX Bench app, right?

Yep. Customize the run and pick T Rex offscreen. It might look weird.

 

[cronos]

Yep. Customize the run and pick T Rex offscreen. It might look weird.

I ran it a couple times and it says my best score is 922.7. That actually looks very sad (it says that the iPhone 6S score is 4,475)

 

[Megatomic]

cronos, I'd appreciate hearing your general impressions on how the A9 feels to you subjectively while running apps like Youtube, Google Play Music, Twitter, etc... I play games oh so rarely so gaming performance is at the bottom of my priority list. Real world apps like the above are important to me. Wow, I sure sound selfish and demanding.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I ran it a couple times and it says my best score is 922.7. That actually looks very sad (it says that the iPhone 6S score is 4,475)

Thank you. Any chance you caught the average fps too?

I really appreciate it.

 

[postmortemIA]

my impressions:
Pros
3GB of RAM makes everything fly. No slowdowns of any kind.
Software and hardware are very polished, premium feel on both.
Sense UI kept to minimum.
Connectivity is great.
Feel is great on both front and back. Soft touch on glass; very accurate and pleasant.
AMOLED screen has great contrast and vibrant yet milky warm pleasant colors... IMO nicer than LCD screens.
Fits well one hand use.

Cons
Dislike is battery life with a heavy usage; but with lighter workload I've used about 30% of battery through work day.
No easy way to turn off vibrations in notifications in 6.0.
Sound quality on decent headphones was supposed to be big selling point: there are 4 presets with BoomSound, not overly impressed with any of them. I thought that my old xperia had better sound output (albeit xperia has cracking noise problems)

 

[Megatomic]

How are you guys liking Now On Tap? Is it fast on the A9 or does it chug along as it does its thing?

 

[core2slow]

Having gone through 4 HTC phones, the common theme has always been horrible battery life. Thank you for reaffirming what I already knew.

 

[lopri]

How is battery holding up?

 

[postmortemIA]

How is battery holding up?

not the best obviously, but I'd guess Nexus 5X isn't any better... if anything AMOLED screen draws less power, and there's lack of bloatware for unlocked version. So at worst is should last through workday. Depends heavily on screen on time and signal strength.

 

[lopri]

The 5X should do better than that becasue I see your phone awakes a lot while your screen is off. Is your phone's Doze working?

Compare the bottom two bars (Awake, Screen on); My 5X rarely wakes when the screen is off but your A9 wakes a whole lot of times even when the screen is off.

 

[cronos]

Thank you. Any chance you caught the average fps too?

I really appreciate it.

Sorry, I missed this. It's 16 fps.

The 5X should do better than that becasue I see your phone awakes a lot while your screen is off. Is your phone's Doze working?

Compare the bottom two bars (Awake, Screen on); My 5X rarely wakes when the screen is off but your A9 wakes a whole lot of times even when the screen is off.

There are tons of different reasons why that could happen. Mine is about the same, because I always have active chatters in a couple of different messaging groups in the background (mostly WhatsApp and Telegram). These are groups that are active basically around the clock as the members are from all over the world. For my typical use, I could maybe add 24 hours of stand by time to my phone without them.

Anyway, I'll hopefully have an update with full experience this weekend. In summary, I'm really unhappy with the battery. I thought Doze will help me, but apparently, not really. I got it to activate maybe one night in a week now, with my special circumstances above.

 

[Desturel]

not the best obviously, but I'd guess Nexus 5X isn't any better... if anything AMOLED screen draws less power, and there's lack of bloatware for unlocked version. So at worst is should last through workday. Depends heavily on screen on time and signal strength.

I'm not a heavy user so my 5x has been going about 35 hours between charges.

I've heard people complaining about the 5x battery life, but it really hasn't been bad for me at all. I think part of the issue might be the apps that people are using. I don't have Facebook, Snapchat, Pandora, etc on my phone so I don't have to worry about those eating up battery.

 

[postmortemIA]

The 5X should do better than that becasue I see your phone awakes a lot while your screen is off. Is your phone's Doze working?

Compare the bottom two bars (Awake, Screen on); My 5X rarely wakes when the screen is off but your A9 wakes a whole lot of times even when the screen is off.

Yep, not sure why it does that, I've looked under Battery optimization and only 3 apps are listed as not optimized
Google Play Services
Messages
Updater

I really don't have much going on or installed ... I do have work Google account along with personal one; both are set up to sync.

IMO it would be nice to disable WiFi and data during do not disturb night hours, I've seen that option in Cyanogen ROMs, but don't recall it on stock ones.

 

[Desturel]

I'm not a heavy user so my 5x has been going about 35 hours between charges.

Here's what my usage on a 5x looks like. Which pretty is pretty standard for the time I've had it.

 

[tsupersonic]

Here's what my usage on a 5x looks like. Which pretty is pretty standard for the time I've had it.

Doesn't look like doze is working properly...I have a nexus 5 that sits on my desk at home, and it just has flat lines when it's idle. Hell even my Moto G 2015 has amazing standby times, even though it doesn't have Marshmallow yet.

 

[Desturel]

Doesn't look like doze is working properly...I have a nexus 5 that sits on my desk at home, and it just has flat lines when it's idle. Hell even my Moto G 2015 has amazing standby times, even though it doesn't have Marshmallow yet.

The phone isn't idle the whole time. I'm mostly listening to music on it so even though the screen is off, Doze shouldn't be kicking in.

 

[Megatomic]

The phone isn't idle the whole time. I'm mostly listening to music on it so even though the screen is off, Doze shouldn't be kicking in.

I can see a perfectly flat slope at around 10pm, it looks like Doze might have been on that time? To me the battery life seems decent enough.

 

[cronos]

Doesn't look like doze is working properly...I have a nexus 5 that sits on my desk at home, and it just has flat lines when it's idle. Hell even my Moto G 2015 has amazing standby times, even though it doesn't have Marshmallow yet.

The tail end of the graph is when it hits 11pm and the lines clearly just started to get flat there.

As I said, I got Doze to activate on my A9 for one night only (after a week now), for about 5-6 hours, and the line was definitely flat and consumed only 2% of battery during that time. I did read up a bit on Doze and it does look like the way it works is that it's strictly automatic, and the phone has to be completely idle for 30 min - 1 hour until it kicked in. Well that's very rarely ever going to happen with what I've got going on in the background with the messaging apps.

Just to clarify about the battery problem that I'm personally experiencing with my A9: I don't have a daily use battery crisis. With my typical work day usage, the A9 lasts for ~30 hours until it needs charging. That's with about 2-2.5 hours of screen time on average. My problem is, when my M7 was brand new, for the same usage pattern it lasted for ~40 hours before it needed charging. With the A9 battery being smaller, this just shows that it performs about the same. That's the only thing I don't like about it, and it annoys me.

Everything else is just perfect. I'm liking the screen even more, and finger print to turn on screen *and* unlock is awesome, not even my wife's S6 can do that (how about the Nexuses?). To take the phone out of the pocket, 'thumb' it on the way to unlock and tap it to the machine to pay for something, all in one movement. It's just so damn convenient.

In a bit of an evil twist, I received my Oneplus X invitation this morning. The design looks good and review says it 'feels' premium (glass back though, which is kind of, eh...) as well. But there's no fingerprint reader and no NFC, and no LTE Band 12 or 17. And Oxygen OS... well I gotta read up on that. Clearly overall it's of lower quality than the A9, but it's a mid-range with a mid-range price.

 

[Megatomic]

In a bit of an evil twist, I received my Oneplus X invitation this morning. The design looks good and review says it 'feels' premium (glass back though, which is kind of, eh...) as well. But there's no fingerprint reader and no NFC, and no LTE Band 12 or 17. And Oxygen OS... well I gotta read up on that. Clearly overall it's of lower quality than the A9, but it's a mid-range with a mid-range price.

I really want to be interested in the OPX, but damn the missing Band 17! I can live with the other compromises but for my usage Band 17 is important and ultimately with it missing I can't buy it.

 

[tsupersonic]

The tail end of the graph is when it hits 11pm and the lines clearly just started to get flat there.

As I said, I got Doze to activate on my A9 for one night only (after a week now), for about 5-6 hours, and the line was definitely flat and consumed only 2% of battery during that time. I did read up a bit on Doze and it does look like the way it works is that it's strictly automatic, and the phone has to be completely idle for 30 min - 1 hour until it kicked in. Well that's very rarely ever going to happen with what I've got going on in the background with the messaging apps.

Just to clarify about the battery problem that I'm personally experiencing with my A9: I don't have a daily use battery crisis. With my typical work day usage, the A9 lasts for ~30 hours until it needs charging. That's with about 2-2.5 hours of screen time on average. My problem is, when my M7 was brand new, for the same usage pattern it lasted for ~40 hours before it needed charging. With the A9 battery being smaller, this just shows that it performs about the same. That's the only thing I don't like about it, and it annoys me.

Everything else is just perfect. I'm liking the screen even more, and finger print to turn on screen *and* unlock is awesome, not even my wife's S6 can do that (how about the Nexuses?). To take the phone out of the pocket, 'thumb' it on the way to unlock and tap it to the machine to pay for something, all in one movement. It's just so damn convenient.

In a bit of an evil twist, I received my Oneplus X invitation this morning. The design looks good and review says it 'feels' premium (glass back though, which is kind of, eh...) as well. But there's no fingerprint reader and no NFC, and no LTE Band 12 or 17. And Oxygen OS... well I gotta read up on that. Clearly overall it's of lower quality than the A9, but it's a mid-range with a mid-range price.

You're right, I saw the pic on my phone. It does appear to doze around 11pm. I've had the Moto G use 0-2% when I sleep. That compares to the iPhone pretty well.

I kind of want an A9 - it really seems like a nice phone, and I've always liked HTC devices. That or the 6P, but I don't like large phones. Also, the 5X/6P both do unlock via fingerprint (nothing to press). My only problem is that they are on the back, and most of the time my phone lays on a flat surface. So I'd have to lay it face down for instant unlock.

The OnePlus X seems like an interesting proposition. However, it doesn't support Band 12/17, like you said. That is a major deal breaker as 17 is used for the majority of AT&T's 4G LTE.

 

[Megatomic]

So guys, it's been a few weeks now. Any further observations you can share with us?

 

[Phokus]

I hope HTC survives and makes a comeback, the M7 was a truly innovative phone design wise and functionality wise. The Nexus 6p should have been what the M9 was.

 

[Megatomic]

I hope HTC survives and makes a comeback, the M7 was a truly innovative phone design wise and functionality wise. The Nexus 6p should have been what the M9 was.

HTC had a decent black Friday. I guess that's not conclusive but perhaps the tide is turning.

 

[cronos]

Just wanted to report that I received the 6.0.1 update today on my A9.

I'm not sure when exactly this came out, but from a brief Google search I found that Android One devices got theirs first around the end of November, and then mainstream Nexus received this update around the first week of December. So at least for this first Android numbered update (there was a security update pushed out a couple of weeks ago) HTC was able to somewhat back their claim of 'Android update 15 days after Nexus', which is a part of my consideration in getting this phone. Let's see if they can keep this up (and also, for how long, because unlike their flagships, HTC never promised to update this phone for two years, just that it will receive a quick update).

About the update itself though: yay new emoji! :/