You mentioned people giving shit to HTC for making cameras with less pixels. I think going with 3/4mpx sensors was just way too small, especially if you consider the fact that Samsung had similar low light performance with their 13mp sensors and better processing. Now Samsung made a small step back to 12mpx, from 16mpx. It's much more reasonable, and the same move that Google also rightfully made with their latest Nexus phones. That said, I'd be hard pressed to choose between my 16 mpx camera on the S6, which is known to take awesome nights shots, or the 12mpx camera which goes even futher from A to A+ in night shots but has slightly lower resolution.
The problem with HTC is that they just couldn't make a single good phone camera and I still think that it translates to many other aspects of their phones - they lack technological maturity, trying to make up for it by wrapping their phones in metal. Now as others do it too, including other Chinese and Taiwanese companies (that's what HTC is), HTC has obsolutely no selling points and don't stand out compared to previously less lucky Chinese companies that now come up with very similar products at a third of HTC's price.
The problem gets even bigger, since those other companies are surpassing HTC. At this point, Xiaomi invests much more into their R&D and quality control than HTC, which is bleeding money and fired top staff, yet HTC is still trying to pull the "premium one" move. Their phones don't sell outside of Taiwan and the US (which surprises me that they still do). Why does it make any sense in HTC's world?
It seems like the new HTC flagship seems to not be in any way competitive so far, going by the leaks. It has nothing on the newest Xiaomi Mi5, yet it surely will be at least twice as expensive. Why? They're both designed and manufactured in the same countries of low workforce costs and use same internals, yet Xiaomi is now led by ex top Google legend, they are hiring top engineers and designers, including many of ex-HTC people, and the best local experts, who offer best bang for the buck and grew with other companies, including HTC.
At this point HTC is left with inferior people, less budget and still stick to the "price premium" strategy which now is just too obviously ridiculous - they don't even have anything on their local competition which offers better product at a fraction of the price. Yet HTC is still trying to be a fraud, shipping their phones to the US for the price of other legit flagships that many people put a lot of money and effort to make.
Yeah, I was sure on the technicalities of what HTC did with their camera, I just know their concept was good but the execution was not. Samsung just came around made it better in addition to their hardware simply being superior.
I had read the Sony sensor was better, so yeah, that was a sigh of relief for me. Even though I know fuck all about sensors and photography in general, it just feels good knowing mine isn't "inferior."
HTC was a weird company for me from the beginning. I had not heard of them until they made the Touch Pro, or something like that, in 08 or 09. It was a WinMo phone at a time when everyone had and wanted BlackBerries. I still remember looking up HTC's site to see what exactly it was they had on the market. Back then, smartphones were a luxury so seeing internet and documents on a phone screen that wasn't pixelated was amazing for me back then. I didn't much from them after that.
It wasn't until Android came to Verizon in the US the Moto Droid and HTC Droid Eris were released and I got the Eris. That's when I got HTC in my system and remembered them from before. And their UI back then was ground breaking, albeit laggy since it was on a 528 mhz CPU with like 128 MB of RAM, or something like that. It was a well-built phone. It felt premium compared to the Droid since it had a rubber back and the glowing trackball that just looked cool when it flashed for notifications. And they had a hit with the Droid Incredible and a few other models, but they still somehow managed to stay in the red and struggled financially.
I don't know what happens to them now. They were supposed to shut down a few years back, around the time the M8 came out, right? It was the M8 that brought them back on the map because it looked so nice for an Android phone. It was comparable to the aesthetics quality people associated with the iPhone and its premium feel. But they've remained stagnant, as you said. Shitty hardware at flagship prices. Other, smaller manufacturers gained popularity in that time. OPPO had a few hits on its hands. Huawei came out of no where to become a Nexus supplier. I don't know much about Xiaomi but I imagine it's big everywhere but the US. HTC is just sitting their scratching its nuts as LG and Samsung fight for the top Android spot.
Whatever it is, I just want Android brands to remain competitive. I used to brush off a lot of the stuff as "gimmicks" but after getting my S7, these features are just examples of companies actually trying. No matter how inaccurate it may be, S Health is pretty damn amazing. Once it's refined to be more accurate, it becomes just one more amazing thing our phones can do. Voice search still blows me away despite using it before it became an Android feature. Remember an app called VLingo? It was pretty accurate even back in 2010 when it came out. Voice search has improved a great deal since then, but it still makes performing tasks much easier. I'm sure many don't think too much about it now, but that's just one of those features that any small advancement in it and I'm like a little kid just enthralled with it.
I had 2 Samsung specific questions.
One, I downloaded Package Disabler Pro and had it disable whatever it considered to be bloatware. It took the apps out the drawer and performance wasn't lagging much to begin with but I don't notice any change in performance anyway. Is there anything else I can do to help this thing run lean? I don't need speed, since it's already so fast, but more for battery life. I know I do some glaringly obvious things. I am never on WiFi. Even on my S3, I was able to finally get better LTE service in my house and LTE was always on outside the house, too. With the S7, it's only faster and more reliable. But I do have "OK Google" voice detection on all the time. I love it, but I'm debating turning it off once the novelty runs out. I have Samsung Pay so my NFC is always on, I guess. Brightness is about 30% and I disabled auto-brightness since I figured sensing lighting was also draining some battery. I always leave bluetooth on because I have it hooked up to my car for calls. Outside of that, I haven't messed with the settings. Anything to disable or values to modify to decrease battery drain? I wish I had root so I could use BetterBatteryStats to see what used how much power but I don't think I'll be rooting this thing to preserve Samsung Pay and avoid tripping KNOX.
Second, is using Fast Charging all the time going to be bad for the battery? I feel like this is an obvious answer but if I can get a full charge in less than an hour or so, I'd still like to keep using that, even though my battery life is pretty OK otherwise and I'm never dangerously low until late nights. 8:30 AM to 7PM and I usually have ~40% leftover.
