Samsung has announced its latest flagship, the Galaxy S6 on the sidelines of the ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. At the same event, HTC has also come out with its latest sensation, the HTC One M9.
Both the phones are expected to hit the market soon and expectedly with similar price tags. So let’s check out how these two latest sensations stack up against each other in a battle of features.
Design
Samsung, which has so far been criticised heavily till now for its plastic and look-alike devices, has been heaped with accolades for its latest Galaxy S6 smartphone. The S6 has a metal frame based unibody with Corning Gorilla Glass 4 coating on both its front and back panel. Also this 5.1 inch display bearing smartphone is quite compact (measures 143.4 x 70.5 x 6.8 mm) and weighs just 138 grams.
On the other hand, HTC One M9 has close resemblance with its predecessor, the M8. Infact, it is quite difficult to distinguish the M9 from the older M8 from a distance. But a closer look will tell you how much HTC has worked on its new smartphone.
The M9’s dual-tone all-metal body features mirrored edges that are ergonomically tapered to effortlessly fit your grip. Its unibody back is curved to achieve the streamlined look and feel of the iconic HTC One series smartphones. It retains the Boom Sound speakers on the front. The HTC One M9, which comes with a 5 inch display, measures 144.6 x 69.7 x 9.6 mm and weighs 157 grams.
Display
The HTC One M9 has the same display that the M8 had, meaning, a 5 inch Super LCD 3 with full HD resolution (1080 x 1920 pixels), resulting in a pixel density of 441 ppi. While the Samsung Galaxy S6 has a 5.1 inch Super AMOLED Display with a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels, resulting in a pixel density of 577 ppi. Both the screens though offer Corning Gorilla Glass 4 protection.
OS, Processor & Memory
The Samsung Galaxy S6 has an Exynos 7420 Chipset that comprises of an octa-core processing unit (quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 & quad-core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57) and 3 GB of RAM. The S6 comes in 32 GB, 64 GB, and 128 GB internal storage versions. Note that Samsung S6 does not offer any expandable storage slot.
The HTC One M9 has a Snapdragon 810 chipset that comprises of an octa-core processor (quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 & quad-core 2 GHz Cortex-A57) and 3 GB of RAM. The internal storage stands at 32 GB, to which another 128 GB can be added via a microSD card.
As is evident, both are quite capable handsets to run multitasks and high end games but owing to its higher storage, the M9 seems to have a slight EDGE over the S6.
Both the phones have the latest Android Lollipop installed. While the M9 has the HTC’s Sense UI 7.0, the Samsung Galaxy S6 offers TouchWiz interface. Both the interfaces have their own pluses and minuses.
Battery
The Samsung Galaxy S6 offers a 2550 mAh battery, but sadly Samsung has not given details as to how long it will last. HTC on the other hand comes armed with a 2840 mAh battery than can provide up to 402 hours of standby and 21 hours and 50 minutes of talk time, both on 3G.
Camera
The HTC One M9 has a 20.7 Megapixel primary camera armed with auto-focus, flash, automatic simultaneous video and and image recording, geo-tagging, smile detection, panorama, HDR, RAW image processing, and 4K video recording. While the front of the HTC One M9 has the primary camera of its predecessor. In the front, it has an HTC UltraPixel (presumably of 4 megapixel resolution) and it claimed to be capable of recording videos at 1080p at 30 fps.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 has a 16 megapixel camera with optical image stabilisation, auto-focus, flash, geo-tagging, face detection, auto HDR, panorama, and video recording at 2160p at 30 fps, 1080p 60 fps, 720p 120 fps, and dual-video recording. The front of the Galaxy S6 has a 5 megapixel camera that can record videos at 1080p at 30 fps.
Connectivity
The Samsung Galaxy S6 has a single nano SIM offering LTE connectivity. Besides, it has WiFi, WiFi Direct and Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, NFC, MHL 3.0 out, and an IR blaster. The HTC One has 4G too, and it has WiFi, WiFi direct, WiFi hotspot, DLNA, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, NFC, MHL 3.0 out, radio, and an IR blaster.
Wrapping Up
HTC is one of the first device makers to come out with smartphones with metal bodies. How much it has improved its mastery in the craft, vis-a-vis the One M9, will be revealed in due course. On the other hand, Samsung is recently toying with the metal unibody. The S6 has already managed to get eyeballs especially for its design. But design is not just the curves and metals; how good are these phones in real life will be revealed later.
Another area where a comparison need to be made and will be made is the camera department where figures hardly matters.
Anyway, both the phones are set to be launched in few months in many countries including India when a lot of questions will get automatically answered.