Samsung and HTC are looking to bounce back following a down year for high-end Android smartphones. The monolithic Korean company lost momentum thanks to uninspired design choices, while HTC seemed content to iterate rather than innovate. A lot of that changes this year, as both companies square off once again for Android supremacy. Both the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC One M9 are landing on all major U.S. carriers this spring, and the battle for dominance and against Apple’s stalwart iPhone 6 looks to be more exciting than ever.
Samsung Galaxy S6 & Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is what the Galaxy S5 should have been. After the disappointing, cheap looking S5, Samsung is roaring back with a gorgeous and powerful phone in two forms: regular and edge. I got some time to try out the Galaxy S6 just before Mobile World Congress and I was deeply moved. I think you will be, too. Start with the body. Plastic, be gone! The S6 is made of metal and glass, but it’s smarter metal and glass than we’ve seen on iPhones: The glass back is Gorilla Glass 4 rather than Apple’s eminently breakable "ion-tempered" stuff. The phone is basically all glass over a colored inlay with a brushed-metal surround.
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| Samsung Galaxy S6 |
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| Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge |
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| Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge |
The basic model comes in white, black, gold, and turquoise. At about 2.75 inches wide and about 4.8 ounces, it’s narrower than the Galaxy S5 and more appropriate for one-handed use. Then there’s the S6 edge, which, yes, has a screen that slopes down on both sides. I find this even more compelling than the standard model; it really stands out, and it’s still comfortable to hold. The "edge" functionality is pared down from the Galaxy Note 4 Edge. It still works as an alarm clock and offers a news feed when the phone’s main screen is off. When the screen is on, though, the edge doesn’t function as a separate panel, although you can pull out a set of favorite contacts by dragging your thumb over it.
The Galaxy S5, not so much. That ridiculous chromed plastic surround ruined it for me, especially when compared with more elegant models like the HTC One M8 and the iPhone 6. The Galaxy S6 is genuinely fun to hold small enough to feel like a phone, but with curves and edges that pleasantly surprise you. It can hold its own with any other manufacturer’s models on design. It puts its competitors on notice. The Galaxy S6’s screen is ridiculously sharp. At 5.1 inches and 2,560 by 1,440, it has 577 pixels per inch. The physical home button, located below the screen, works both as a
fingerprint sensor (touch, not swipe) and as a camera launch button if you tap it twice.
There’s still an IR sensor for heart rate monitoring on the back, and an IR emitter for remote controlling home electronics on the top. What you won’t find are a memory card slot or removable battery. The battery here is smaller than in past Galaxy S phones: 2,550mAh on the normal model and 2,600mAh on the edge, as opposed to 2,800mAh on the Galaxy S5. Samsung says the new phones have better power management, a more efficient processor, and both wireless and quick USB charging built in. But you know that super-dense screen is going to suck a lot of power, so battery life is one of the top questions here. As for storage, there will be 32, 64, and 128GB models.
The S6 will be the first Samsung phone with a Samsung processor in the U.S. Although Samsung is officially being very coy about this, I asked people close to development and found that yes, the new Exynos 7 chip (paired ith a Qualcomm modem) will be the processor in the U.S. models as well. The camera has been bumped up to 16 megapixels, and yes, it has a bump. The front camera is 5MP. Both cameras collect a lot of light, with an f/1.9 maximum aperture, and white balance has been enhanced by IR sensing, which helps the phone determine whether it’s indoors or out. When I compared a photo taken with the S5 with the same photo taken using the S6, the S6’s photo had much better exposure balance, was less blurry, and was much less blown out in bright areas. The speaker grille is on the bottom, with the headphone jack and a fast-charging USB port that’s compatible with Qualcomm QuickCharge.
The bottom edge of the phone looks a lot like the iPhone 6’s, which will probably cause some talk, although the rest of the phone doesn’t look like an iPhone at all. Samsung said the speaker is 1.5 times as loud as the S5’s back-portedspeaker, and played some music to prove it. It isn’t HTC’s BoomSound level of richness, but it’ll do. Samsung pared down its overly complex TouchWiz software from the S4 to the S5, but not enough for many people. The Galaxy Note Edge then added a bit more complexity, with apps that run on its curved edge. The S6, Samsung told me, is yet another move towards simplicity, although the OS isn’t the same as stock Android Lollipop 5.0.2.
Samsung showed how it’s further trimmed down options (and hopefully, memory footprint) with the S6, with simpler menus and faster load times all around. When I checked on my test S6, I found that Samsung’s software used 7GB, down from 7.78GB on the Note 4 Edge. Launching the camera has gotten much faster: I got from button press to image in 0.65 second, as compared with 1.6 seconds on the Galaxy S5. That’s a noticeable difference. The phone also supports the Samsung Pay (formerly LoopPay) mobile payment system, which connects to actual existing magnetic stripe readers rather than needing some exotic NFC-based system to make credit card purchases.
It works with MasterCard and Visa, but not American Express (yet). Your credit card information will be stored in an encrypted manner on the phone, Samsung said. To use it, you swipe up from the bottom of the phone and then rest your finger on the fingerprint sensor in the home button.
HTC One M9
Taste is everything at HTC. Where Samsung and LG dream big, HTC is doing the best job so far of delivering a smaller and more tasteful, but still high-end Android phone. The HTC One M9 is a little smaller and cuter than last year’s M8, and is a bit more of a fashion phone than its major Android competitors. Superficially, the M8 and M9 look a lot alike. They’re both all metal, with rounded corners and big BoomSound speakers above and below the screen. HTC moved the power button from the top to the side, and put a slightly strange "lip" around the edge of the phone. That doesn’t make design sense until you hear that there’s going to be a two-tone silver-and-gold model, and the lip marks the place where the color changes.
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| HTC One M9 |
The M9 is just a few millimeters shorter and a teensy bit thicker than the M8, but not enough to matter. The 5-inch 1080p LCD screen on the M9 is much brighter than the M8’s, though, which is very easy to see when the phones are next to each other. HTC ditched the “ultrapixel” main camera for a more conventional 20MP unit with 4K video recording; because this camera bumps out from the body a little,HTC covered it with sapphire glass to prevent scratches. I snapped some photos and videos, and the camera was extremely fast, but the video camera mode had serious autofocus problems. It couldn’t lock in until I tapped on the screen to focus. (Prototypes are often like that.) Playing back my video, the BoomSound speakers were very loud and extremely rich.
The ultrapixels, by the way, are now on the front; the 4MP front-facing camera is just the M8’s rear camera turned around. There’s still a microSD card slot on the side capable of holding 128GB cards, which supplement the standard 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM. The M9 uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor. I ran a quick SunSpider Web benchmark on the M9 and got the same speed I saw on the LG G Flex 2 at CES, which was half the speed I saw on the production G Flex 2. Software optimization matters a lot, clearly.
Speaking of software, the new Sense 7, which goes with Android 5.0.1 Lollipop, is a big part of the cute, cuddly experience here. HTC’s BlinkFeed app and its lock screen react to your location and the time of day. So at dinner time, you’ll see Yelp reviews of tasty meals near you. When I got my M9 demo unit, it had a theme on it that turned all of the app icons into little circles. There’s another theme where, with one touch, you can turn everything into a cartoon-planets-and-stars theme, including the supposedly unchangeable standard Android action buttons. There will be branded themes from the likes of Disney, as well as a theming option to go with your wardrobe: You can take a picture of yourself, and the phone will re-theme itself in colors that match your outfit.
It may be a frivolous feature, but it’s also fun, stylish, personal, unique, and easy. All of this makes the M9 more customizable (for non-geeks) than most other phones. More on the productivity side, HTC has a new location-enabled home screen widget that will use your GPS location to pop up the apps you use most commonly at work (productivity), home (entertainment), or on the go. That’s a good start. But HTC also intends to tie it into a points-of-interest database, so you’ll get tip calculators in a restaurant, train schedules on a platform, and Waze on the road.
| How They Size Up |
Samsung Galaxy S6 |
HTC One M9 |
Apple iPhone 6 |
| OPERATING SYSTEM |
Android 5.0 |
Android 5.0 |
iOS 8 |
| CPU |
Samsung Exynos |
Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 |
Apple A8 |
| DIMENSIONS (INCHES, HWD) |
5.65 × 2.78 x 0.27 |
5.69 × 2.74 × 0.38 |
5.44 × 2.64 × 0.27 |
| WEIGHT (OUNCES) |
4.87 |
5.854 |
4.55 |
| SCREEN SIZE (INCHES) |
5.1 |
5 |
4.7 |
| SCREEN TYPE |
Super AMOLED HD |
Super LCD 3 |
IPS LCD |
| SCREEN RESOLUTION (PIXELS) |
2,560 × 1,600 |
1,920 × 1,080 |
1,334 × 750 |
| SCREEN DENSITY (PPI) |
577 |
441 |
326 |
| CAMERA RESOLUTION |
16MP rear, 5MP front |
20.7MP rear, 4MP front |
8MP rear, 1.2MP front |
| VIDEO CAMERA RESOLUTION |
4K/1080p |
1080p |
1080p |
| BLUETOOTH VERSION |
4.1 LE |
4.1 LE |
4.0 LE |
| GPS |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| NFC |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| TOTAL INTEGRATED STORAGE |
32/64/128GB |
32GB |
32/64/128GB |
| MICRO SD
SLOT? |
No |
Yes |
No |
Closing The Gap : Samsung Galaxy S6, Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge & HTC One M9
With the iPhone leading the high-end smartphone market by a country mile in terms of sales, it’s clear that Samsung and HTC both identified where they’ve been falling short and attacked those points with these new phones. That isn’t copying the iPhone; it’s competition driving everyone forward, the same way Apple saw how Samsung was succeeding with larger phones and followed up with the iPhone 6 Plus. In Samsung’s case, the gap was style.
The Galaxy S5 didn’t feel like a premium product; although it had a gorgeous screen, its cheap chromed plastic surround gave it a chintzy look. Samsung’s user interface software, though pared down from what was used on the Galaxy S4, was still overly complex and had too many options. The S5 was powerful, but it didn’t exude taste. The S6, like the S5, tops this year’s iPhone on power, but does it with style.
The HTC One M8 had taste in spades. Like Samsung, HTC does its own UI overlay on top of Android, but HTC Sense is generally considered to be good looking, elegant software. HTC’s big mistake (other than its inept, often weird marketing) was its “ultrapixel” camera, which put the M8 significantly behind competitors on this critical application. So the Galaxy S6 and One M9 hopefully now both match or exceed the bestselling iPhone 6’s style, camera prowess, and overall powers.
The rest of the story is about execution. Samsung is a marketing juggernaut, but it’s spent the past few years trying to convince consumers that features like a removable battery matter; now it needs to pivot and explain why the S6’s standout style is more important. HTC has been making tremendously well-reviewed phones for years now, but needs to cut it out with the weird commercials featuring Robert Downey Jr. and trolls. If you’re shopping for a high-end smartphone this year, it’s worth waiting until both of these are on the shelves before making your decision. Although LG still needs to weigh in with its G4 (which is probably coming in May), you’re sure to find two very strong choices here.