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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ChronoReverse - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Thanks for the very indepth review. I already own the HTC 10 and like it a lot but I still like reading about the details like the wifi testing.Vagabondjonez - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
thanks for getting this out Josh. Theres alot of things we could still talk about. The charge test always seem off to me. I know about varying conditions ,but the G5 can definitely top up in 1 hour and 19 minutes with included wall adapter in a 70° room on a plastic surface made partially of composite wood. Htc wont reveal the particular source of alluminum that theyre using,but its much softer than 7000 series when judging the various skuffs and corner drop my unit sustained. If you ever have the time ,it be great to speak more in depth. email :cyborgsoda17@gmail.comphilehidiot - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Aye, I too am grateful - a wait but I appreciate that once something is significantly delayed it makes sense to keep everything else on track and finish it when you can. The nagging will now end.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
I too, give you my thanks.Having owned an M7, I was looking forward to this.
Cheers.
tangibleghost - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
I think it's to your credit that you pushed it out, even if it's not going to help any early adopters make their decisions. It's good to have full reviews of all the major phone releases as a historical reference if nothing elseSomeDude2552 - Sunday, September 25, 2016 - link
Umm yes but fagPhones were reviewed instantly.mortimerr - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Not true at all. It's still the only worthwhile Android device, and if people aren't taken with the Pixel devices, will be the only one to get. It's only not more worthwhile due to price.But if your only measure of a quality of device is how many units its marketing is capable of selling, then you're reading reviews on the wrong site.
TheMysteryMan11 - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Smartphones have shelf life of 1 year. Majority of purchases are made in 1st quarter of any newly launched device in the android world.Nobody in their right mind is going to wait 7 months for a review no matter how good it is to make purchase decision. The fate of HTC 10 is sealed.
And it does matter what masses buy. Look at HTC, they broke their own promise of quick updates? Why is that? Not enough resources because not many are buying their devices?
Probably.
They promised 15 day update for A9. It was still a failure. And now even that is not happening.
Sales directly affect the future of the device and company. Specially someone as bloated as HTC which is used to being a huge corporation and finding it tough now.
I still come to Anandtech for PC component reviews. But waiting for phone review to pop up here on AT is pointless exercise.
Byte - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
You can also come here for iphone reviews, because we all know you have to wait for those before purchase.TheMysteryMan11 - Monday, September 19, 2016 - link
Lets not divert to Apple's picket fenced garden shall we? :P