We haven’t even had our morning coffee yet and Mobile World Congress-related leaks are already making their way to the interwebs. The latest shows us yet another look at the controversial HTC One M9, titled such because there’s been a lot of noise and debate about its supposed design.
Some lucky gent who’s in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress got his hands on the supposed device early, and decided to put it side-by-side up against the HTC One M7 from 2013 and last year’s HTC One M8. They look quite similar, and there are no signs of the reported overhauled design that @evleaks told us to expect.
There’s been mounting evidence that HTC will go with this “refresh” of a design and very little to support @evleaks’ original claim, so we’ll have to wait until they take the wraps off later today to see if this is the real deal or evidence that HTC’s finally gotten better at hiding their wares. Stay tuned as we’ll bring you all the details live from the event.
[In all subsequent test images, the Galaxy S6 appears first followed by the iPhone 6. Click to make each larger.]
The immediate takeaway? There is definitely a difference in default white balance for the two. You can decide for yourself, but the iPhone 6 certainly has a more natural-looking color profile. The whites captured by the GS6 take on a off-white, almost yellow hue.
The Galaxy S6 on the whole seems to produce images that are slightly darker than its iPhone counterpart, a quality that is very apparent given the shooting conditions we had (lots of bright lighting, a tony of shiny/reflective white surfaces). The impression is that the iPhone 6 camera is a bit more effortless than the Galaxy S6 when it comes to point-and-shoot photography. For the S6, getting the perfect shot will likely take a bit more fiddling around with settings and scene.
One area where the S6’s camera excels is resolution. The phone’s 16MP shooter provides clarity beyond the iPhone’s sensor at close zoom levels. You can see a comparison in the two images above.
The Galaxy S6 clearly offered the better front facing camera, as seen in the side-by-side photos above. Strangely, the selfie cam didn’t seem as plagued by white balance issues, and it offers photos of superbly higher resolution and clarity than that of the iPhone. Compare to the images of Chris’ mug just prior to the front-facing shots. Captured with the rear camera, they give a good comparison of how the skin tone and other colors look across the two devices and their multiple camera sensors.
Above is the best we could get to replicating lowlight conditions at Samsung’s demo stations (we tucked the above Android pins into a cabinet). As you can see, this was far from the darkest of shooting conditions, but the iPhone 6 (right) was a bit more up to the task than the Galaxy S6.
The final photographic results are important, but there are other things that go into making a smartphone camera unique or useful. As with previous releases, Samsung offer far more robust camera software than Apple, giving users a plethora of options. The scene settings and other tweaks add flexibility to the GS6 that isn’t really present with the iPhone 6 (though Apple has slowly been beefing up the software side of their camera in recent releases). The Galaxy S6 also promises super fast shooting with a camera app that Samsung claims can be launched in 0.7 seconds after double-tapping the phone’s home button.
A camera’s performance often comes down to how you use it, so mileage will always vary. While we think it’s pretty clear that Apple’s phone plays nicer with lighting and gives us photos with truer whites, it can’t match the clarity or versatility of the Galaxy S6. Check out more camera samples below.
Yesterday, SoundHound announced to the world that they’ve been working on a virtual assistant for 10 years, aiming to take on the likes of the Google app (formerly Google Search), Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. SoundHound said that Hound was fast, provided deep results, has the ability to take on detailed query criteria, and has the ability to speak naturally. Hound is supposed to understand both context like the Google app, but also able to understand detail, something Google and other’s do not offer.
How does Hound perform in real a real world test? Watch the video below to find out. (Yes, it’s long. I didn’t want to edit out the failures. I felt they showed real world results.)
For a beta app that’s aimed to take on Google on Android and soon Siri on iOS, Hound isn’t bad. You can tell the app is beta, as the experience can’t handle the competition from time to time. I found found myself having to retry a query because it failed or the voice recognition was just plain horrible. However, all is not lost. Hound can do certain tasks and queries that even the mighty Google cannot handle. Hound is able to answer questions such “show me hotels near Times Square that cost less than 0 per night” or “show me 5 star restaurants in New York City” or “what’s the population of China and the population of Russia and the population of Japan and the population of Germany and the population of Italy”. What Hound can do, it can do pretty damn well.
I’m sure the company will continue to improve their product over time and I’ll be paying attention closely, as will Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and any other corporation that might be interested in acquiring their semi-impressive technology. Hopefully the next beta fixes the voice recognition issues and adds an easy way to access Hound, such as a homescreen widget.
What do you think of Hound? Let us know in the comments.
