HTC One E9s Review

HTC One E9s is a decent smartphone. It has got decent features. Decent build quality. Decent camera quality. That’s a lot of ‘decent’ don’t you think? Well, duh. It’s a mid range phone remember? You can’t expect greatness at that price, unless its some company’s flagship phone on fire-sale.

This time i am going to try a different approach. Instead of writing long paragraphs. I am going to break it in-to points.

Build Quality

– Phone is very well built and is very sturdy. Material used for body is plastic.

– When HTC One E9s launched a lot of websites reported that it comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 4.

– It was on eBay’s seller description and on HTC own website too but now its removed and there’s no way to confirm it now.

– It does have a notification LED.

Display

– The display of this is of 5.5 inches and it has HD resolution. It also has good viewing angles.

– Now again, it’s not mentioned anywhere whether it’s an IPS or AMOLED or any other type of display.

– But because of its good viewing angles one can safely assume that it’s not a TFT display.

– It’s a very bright display and also very colour saturation videos look very good on it.

– It’s DPI is 320.

Camera

– It’s primary camera is of 13MP with BSI sensor and LED flash.

– In good lighting condition it takes decent photos but misses a lot of details.

– In low-light it takes garbage photos to be honest. Instead of the object in the image all you will notice is the blurriness and noise.

– LED flash might help in that situation. It also takes out of focus and blurry images sometimes.

– It does comes with HDR option and can also shoot full HD video the quality of which is not good.

– It front camera is of 4MP and comes with HTC’s Ultrapixel technology.

– Regardless of all that technology it takes very artificial and dark photos.

Multimedia

– Its music quality is pretty good for a mid-range phone. Both in earphones and through the BoomSound speakers.

– It also comes with two separate set of HTC BoomSound options. One for speakers and one set for earphones which you can see in the video below.

– It comes HTC Sense music player but without any equalizer.

– It supports up-to 1080p video playback.

OS/Storage/RAM

– This is one of very good things of this phone. It comes with Android 5.0.2 with full non-skimmed version of HTC Sense 7.0.

– HTC Sense 7.0 is a very feature rich UI and very deeply integrated in Android 5.0.2, it looks good too and also supports native themes.

– The OS/UI runs very fast and lag free most of the time.

– It comes with 16GB internal storage out of which you’ll get around 9GB free and is expandable up-to 2TB via micro SD card.

– It does support move to SD but it does not support USB OTG.

– It comes with 2GB of RAM out of which you’ll get around 700MB – 800MB free.

Performance

– Performance is also a very good part of this phone all thanks to its HD screen.

– Because of that resolution it can play almost any game on the Google Play store at high settings.

– Chip-set is Mediatek MT6752M which consists of 8 Cortex A53 processors clocked at 1.5GHz and Mali T760 GPU.

– It’s price to performance to performance ratio is also good.

Connectivity

– It’s a 4G phone with Dual SIM option(Nano SIM).

– Its WiFi works pretty fast and doesn’t drop the connection that easily.

– Other connectivity options are Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, AGPS, HTC Connect, HTC connect to the mini remote.

Battery

– Its battery is of 2600mAh.

– And like i showed in my review video below it loses around 20% of battery in approximately an hour.

– But that is only when the phone’s brightness is at full and WiFi is on and you are using it continuously.

– So you on moderate use you can expect it to lose that much battery around 1.5 or 2 hours in best case scenario.

– That means you will get total multimedia usage time of around 6-7 hours on this phone and more than that if you use it just for calling and with power saver setting on.

Your choice

– This phones fixed all the problems i had with HTC Desire 820 and 820s.

– HTC Desire 820 didn’t have a powerful chip-set but did have full HTC Sense and BoomSound speakers.

– HTC Desire 820s did have powerful chip-set but didn’t have full HTC Sense and BoomSound speakers.

– You try to find the best balance between those two phones and you will get this phone.

– It’s overall a very decent mid-range phone just don’t expect much from its camera and you’ll be okay with it.

– For around Rs. 20,000(Approx $320) or anything below i can recommend it and i have a feeling that its price is going to come down very fast so you can wait for that too if you want.