Juzh wrote:He offers no arguments as to why he would chose M9 over ANY samsung phone. This is how you know the guy is ignorant on the matter and has a fanboy tinted glasses on his head.
Woah hold it there buddy. No reason to go on the attack here. The post wasn't intended as a serious review, it was more of a lighthearted
declaration of love post. I'm a bit baffled how you could miss that, given the smilies I posted. I wouldn't have thought someone would actually take this topic anything other than with a bit of lightheartedness, given it's a completely off-topic related discussion.
I wouldn't call myself ignorant though, given I've come from three Samsungs (S3, S4 and S5) and have actually played around with a S6 Edge (for a substantial amount of time), so I am fairly informed on what each phone does well and not.
Fair enough, I'll bite though.
Got to love the benchmarks - so the Samsung scores higher in some (most?) of them. Have benchmarks actually ever mattered when comparing phones of similar age and price? Posting benchmarks, is like... well... arguing one phone is better because its CPU is clocked higher while ignoring that perhaps the software behind one is actually more bloated and in the end perhaps slower. Which brings me to Samsung phones. So it has faster memory (hence the better Random Read stats in the above benchmark). Yet, in practical terms, most Samsung phones
feel noticeably
slower than many other phones because its Touchwiz front-end is very sluggish compared to other Android overlays. HTCs Sense is a nice example and what makes the phone actually quick and responsive to use. Benchmarks only tell one half of the story - actually using a phone an entirely other.
Benchmarks are of relevance when wanting to find out how fast a phone can perhaps process and render a (complex) website. Or how fast an app loads, when it is not in memory, or inside memory. Some arbitrary benchmark doesn't really define any of it - the 'result' is often a sum of results summarized into a singular meaningless value. So a phone might have a few points more or less. In some areas a phone might score 3 times higher in a particular benchmark - yet, the
real world difference is anything but 3 times as noticeable.
Samsung owners are quick to point out that, it has a state-of-the-art higher resolution screen, backed by superior AMOLED technology. All rather nice. But is it actually a tangible difference when not viewed through a magnifying glass? A pixel density of 577ppi is actually rather overkill, to the point I'm wondering if Samsung simply stuck it in there for tech-freaks and to offer a spec-sheet advantage, for bragging rights. Any other phone that does the more typical fullhd resolution at a 5 inch screen delivers roughly 441ppi - and I'd be quite amazed if most people could tell the difference, unless they are holding their phones closer to their eyes (which would hint at less than optimal vision, so the difference in resolution becomes moot anyway). AMOLED does make a difference, but compared to a LCD, it's rather down to subjective preference.
The Samsung better damn well have 'the better specs' - its memory hog in TouchWiz, the higher resolution and the overall preinstalled bloatware means it actually needs to process more to achieve parity with a more efficient device. Which ironically is why iPhones have been generally at the top end since forever, because the underlying OS is that much more efficient.
So much for specs...
Juzh wrote:A smart person actually checking out some reviews and tests will run as far away for M9 as possible. There's a reason HTC is on a downwards spiral.
Actually, a
smart person would actually go into a store and look at both phones side by side and compare them like for like according to what one wants in a phone and stay far away from most [internet] reviews making a living of comparing specs they don't understand in the slightest to derive any sort of conclusion.
Most people actually obsessed with any form of specs (especially when comparing phones of similar age and price / tech) are usually those looking for reasons to be happy with their purchase.
Now to my opinion why I would happily choose a HTC over a Samsung any time again? Not any of the above actually. Well except TouchWiz, which is rather frustrating to use. Fair enough if you've never actually used anything else, but there are overlays that are actually much better. No, the main reason why I've come to move on from Samsung phones is because they have a rather bad track record in regards to bugs and overall [software] stability. A few examples of no-goes I've experienced with my Samsungs:
Galaxy S3:
- when making phonecalls, it would often happen that the line is there ringing, but for some reason no sound over the speakers. To solve it, you would have to hang-up and redial - not knowing if the other person had actually picked-up or not. In combination with our largest telecom provider, this would happen 4 out of 10 calls. This wasn't a faulty phone btw - I actually had 3 S3s (one 16GB version / two 32GB versions) and two friends who had the same phone with identical issues. Research showed that it was most likely some bug within the radio firmware, but nothing that could be solved. No phone is entirely faultless, so you learn to live with it.
Galaxy S4 & S5:
- both suffered from the same fault; After update to Kitkat, phone would randomly reboot multiple times a day. Usually this wouldn't be noticeable, due to the phone being in your pocket, but when using frequently, it would actually reboot whilst on the phone or while texting messages. Initial analysis of the problem led me to believe the battery was faulty, which was then later replaced. When that did not solve the problem, I did some research only to find that it's a rather common problem quite a few people suffered from (discussion pin pointing to some installed app perhaps triggering the restart, which was later found not to be the issue, since my phone had practically no apps installed). The only possible solution (that Samsung itself suggested); Factory resetting the phone. Nice. That solved the issue for a few weeks until it restarted. Sending the phone in for repairs (which led them to replace the entire motherboard) netted no solution either. Issues on both S4 and S5. Only the latest updated to Lollipop actually seemed to solve it - perhaps. I've moved on since, so I've given up caring if it still happened or not.
- Update to Lollipop on the S5 netted a bug that the screen auto-brightness failed to work properly and was far to dim. Later solved (after a few months), though one begs the question how this one could slip through.
These are just a few, you can read up on quite a few issues on XDA. And no, I'm not refering to rooted modified phones; this was entirely in regards to phones running stock software. Fair play if you find yourself reading this as a Samsung owner without ever having any issues. Earth is a big place, with many different regions, telecom providers and with even a higher degree of people who use their phones with different software. In most cases, the apps you install can play a significant role in how well your phone runs, how stable it is. Yet, I've been using my phones as close to stock as possible (with one or two additional apps installed) and I've never encountered them to be responsible for any issues ever. In short, I can live with a phone not working well if *I* (or the software I choose to install) mess it up. Phones restarting / crashing due to faulty manufacturer updates/software is a definitive no go; A phone that can't perform it's primary function in my eyes is a compromised device and not fit for purpose. A harsh verdict perhaps, but completely justified by the fact that there is absolutely no way to revert Android/manufacturer updates that have been already installed. You are left with essentially a broken phone.
I've since moved on to HTC and
I just like it better. I've had two HTCs so far, the M8 and the M9 and they've been nothing short of bullet-proof. No crashes, no bugs, ever. Sense is flawless and smooth and the overall software and design of the phone is a lot more business focused than any of the Samsungs I've bought and used. Another bonus: Most apps, even the HTC ones, can actually be disabled. Try that on a Samsung, where not even some bloatware can be deactivated unless rooted...
Anyway, smartphones are usually a thing of preference. If you like one better over the other, fair enough. Tastes are different. I freely admit Samsung have some cutting-edge hardware underneath its shell. But their software division has a lot of ground to cover and is far far behind, aesthetically but more importantly in regards to quality and efficiency vs some of its main competitors. And some of the bugs I have encountered in Samsung phones have made them an unacceptable prospect for me. In most real-world situations, I find the HTC M9 (even the M8) a much better phone, irregardless of any specs that might point to a different conclusion, hence the points I made for the HTC M9. Even than the newer S6 mind you, which perhaps doesn't suffer from any bigger issues (yet). We'll see when the first big firmware updates arrive.
Ignoring the issues I've had and assuming a flawless working device, I'd still chose a HTC purely because Sense is that much better than TouchWiz. It might have the better processor, the better benchmarks, but if you've used these two phones side by side, you'd know that the M9 remains quite a bit more stable and smooth throughout multitasking because it has more usuable memory and isn't held back by a subpar engineered overlay in Touchwiz. Not as if this would be an issue for anyone, but it's one of the realworld examples that defeats pretty any benchmark you throw at it precisely because it can't be quantified in one.
But at the end of the day, a better camera or even the more simpler point that one has hundreds of accessories for it will be more important to most people. Or that it is simply is the only viable competitor in an overly iphone/apple dominated market, so any other smaller device is quickly discarded.
Nice phone, although the Snapdragon 615 is not a top performer!
