Why I switched back to S5 from HTC M8

[anon5664829]

Better at...? (You know I always have to ask that)

The S5 has gotten some great reviews of the screen they are using, saying that it has caught up to IPS in several categories. So far the Nexus 5 still has the best (in terms of accuracy) screen on a phone, and it is IPS, but it sounds like some exciting things are happening in display tech, and Sammy is using some of them to make a screen that people are really loving. So while it may not be the most accurate out there, it is doing well in the categories of brightness, it didn't do poorly in accuracy and a lot of people really like the "pop" that over-saturated screens provide. My laymen's guess at the 'top 5 screens' on shelves today only includes 1 SAMOLED, but this is that one.

White accuracy is very important to me.

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[msavic6]

White accuracy is very important to me.

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Have you used the S5 in Cinema mode? The whites are very pure and not tinted like on previous AMOLED panels, in some cases it even makes the M8 whites look yellowish.

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[anon5664829]

Have you used the S5 in Cinema mode? The whites are very pure and not tinted like on previous AMOLED panels, in some cases it even makes the M8 whites look yellowish.

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Hmm. interesting I just tried the default mode at the shops.

 

[slackerjack]

Yep - it's much better - Having my monitors at the office and home professionally calibrated (given the job) spoils me on displays. I will say that the screen on the S5 is "good(er)" than the AMOLEDs that have come before it - it's certainly more accurate - though it still has it's issues. That said, I've typically preferred AMOLED's on phones specifically because of the high-perfect contrast (and thus battery life and eyeball savings) you get from those types of displays. In the past, in particular - night time reading (on a bw screen like say a kindle) has been "ghosty" but now with the improved screen tech - it' just fine. Exciting time for screen tech - and just think what's around the corner!

 

[slackerjack]

. My laymen's guess at the 'top 5 screens' on shelves today only includes 1 SAMOLED, but this is that one.

You know what - I'm going to venture a guess and say it's two - the panel on the GS5 and the panel on the Note 3 (different generations) - these are certainly two of the best panels on the market today for size/performance ratio.

But that's just a guess...

Jack

 

[Kevin OQuinn]

It should be noted that the measured white point of the S5 display is 6,541 and the goal is 6,504. That makes the S5 the best "white" there is. It is but one measure that shouldn't be taken alone, but it's notable.

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[anon5664829]

It should be noted that the measured white point of the S5 display is 6,541 and the goal is 6,504. That makes the S5 the best "white" there is. It is but one measure that shouldn't be taken alone, but it's notable.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

Really? In that case I prefer the S5 display

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[NYClawstudent]

Sorry folks, but after spending several trial days with each phone, the Samsung AMOLED was far superior. It displays much better color saturation and photos/pages jump out at year. While the IPS HTC display may be more "natural" looking (and also better in natural sunlight), the S5's display is a real joy.

You can tell that Samsung really worked on improving the display and ensuring that it outclasses anything else out there.

As to the mathematics of the M8's slightly larger display. the approx. 7% doesnt appear to help much at all. I almost find HTC's methodology similar to apple's. The screen size advancement from the iphone 4s to 5 was slight--and narrowly extended the display size to keep the screen's ratio intact. I suspect that HTC did the same.

That being said--after initially wanting a galaxy note 3 and trying out a buddy's---the S5's screen is just about the perfect ratio for visibility and day to day tasks.

 

[aramos87]

Deleted

 

[Raptor007]

I wish these threads would stop

Both the gs5 and m8 are great phones. The things everyone says what makes one better than the other, is all personal preferences.

For those who can't decide, go to the store and play with both of them. Don't let the Internet decide for you.

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I actually did just that today while I was returning my GN3 to AT&T. I played with the M8 and I did own a Developer Edition M7 last year and made it into a GPE with 64GB of storage which was nice. The M8 is a very good phone, great design and with the microSD slot was on my list of top devices. Where it falls short for me is the onscreen buttons, why they didn't follow the M7 route and put the buttons in that useless black bar that say HTC is beyond me. Had they done that I would actually be using an M8 right now. I need 32GB of internal + microSD, I could even learn to live with a sealed battery which is another pet peeve of mine. But the onscreen buttons using up the added real estate is just a stupid move.

The S5 is a solid phone and I have owned many Samsung and HTC devices but the lack of 32GB on Samsung has me waiting for the S5 32GB to arrive before I make a final decision. Whichever phone I get will easily be replaced in 6-12 months anyways.

 

[Raptor007]

Mostly because when comparing anything it's important to have identical content. With different content you invalidate the results. It's also important to see the impact of the difference.

I understand the "lit up area" statement, but that's not the right way to do it. Extra space for the sake of extra space is useless. The question is "How does this impact my experience? " which your picture fails to answer.

Compare your pic to mine. Which is easier to see the available real estate on and the impact it has on the overall experience?

People can look at mine and say "oh, I'll get a few extra lines of text" and then decide if that's a big deal for them or not.

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/14/04/24/qututy5a.jpg

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Correct you need to display the same content on both devices to be fair. As you show in your image the M8 has less usable space with the onscreen buttons eating up the extra .3" of space they gave us. Sad really its a stellar phone but why should I give up space because some ***** in R&D decided to leave a logo on the front like tat on their backside, ugly, unnecessary and clueless design choices.

 

[Aquila]

The difference in the browser's display of the byline seems to be caused only by scaling and perhaps a failure of the UI to instruct the app how many pixels are actually available for content display and the ratio of horizontal to vertical. One can see this with the naked eye by noticing that while the blue ribbons are sorta lined up to each other in each device, the green ribbon for "shop android" is noticeably lower. We can also infer that a difference must otherwise exist when we intellectually know that the screen is wider on the M8 than the M7, yet the words line up generally to the same reference points (F in forums to the middle of N in androidcentral, H in help relative to the e in Search Site, etc). Obviously scaling of the UI is occurring and we also know this ought to happen on some level anyways due to the same count of pixels being displayed over a different area and the same count of pixels being displayed on each dimension. Short version, everything is slightly larger on the M8. If they instead programmed things to be identical in size, we'd see the potential for more content on the M8 arise.

For example, in the M8 the distance between the outer edge and the "T" in "The Forums" is .25", while in the M7 it is .21". The same thing happens when measuring the span of the word "AT&T" from the junction of the horizontal line in A with it's outside angled line to the edge of the vertical line in the T is .58" on the M8 and .54" on the M7. This presents two values that do not topically agree on scaling whereas the white space before the word "The" in "The Forums" is 19% larger on the M8 than the M7 or 16% smaller on the M7 than the M8 and the word "AT&T" is roughly 7.4% larger on the M8 than the M7 or 6.9% smaller on the M7 than the M8. Similarly, the word "Android Central" in the blue ribbon is 1.37" on the M8 and 1.31" on the M7 (so the M8 is 4.6% larger or the M7 is 4.4% smaller).

As indicated previously, even when one discounts the area of the buttons as part of the screen area, the M8 is still 7.6% larger in area than the M7's screen - yet we are seeing less content. As the measurements in the 2nd paragraph all reference scaling horizontally, we can determine why the larger area displays less content by also examining the distance between the blue ribbon and green ribbon (both previously referenced). On the M8 it is 1.42" while on the M7 it is 1.34", a figure that means the distance is 6% greater on the M8 or 5.6% less on the M7. Thus the M8 is stretching the content in both directions, horizontally and vertically. That all makes sense and the horizontal stretch ought not make a difference except in the case of text wrap, which we do not observe on this screenshot.

What this means is simple: Everything displayed on the M8 is slightly bigger than the same thing on the M7. The same count of pixels in the status/notification bar is slightly more area in terms of physical space on the M8 than on the M7 and this is visually noticeable on just about every block of color individually from one to the other, but especially inferred by the lower position of text and content on the M8 relative to the M7. It is likely that the word "AT&T" (and the other examples) are identical in the volume of pixels that they span and thus we are losing content because 5% of the height and of the total area of the M8 is black. Since the scaling of the screen occurred both horizontally and diagonally (approximately 6.4% in each direction) and the absence of word wrap negates the value of horizontal scaling, the vertical scaling of 6.4% is being heavily offset by the 5% of the vertical that is taken up by the navigation row. The M8 screen is approximately .26" larger than the M7 and roughly .22 of that is taken up by the 96 pixel navigation row while the entire 4.36" height is taken into account on the scaling, rather than only the 4.1" which is visible when not in immersive mode.

 

[SmartphoneNerd]

Here are some pics of the M7 on the left (4.7" screen) vs. the M8 on the right to support your comments about lack of screen real estate.
The M8 useable screen area measures out to about 4.75"....such a huge phone for such a small screen.
[url]http://i1223.photobucket.com/albums/dd501/Seatttle/M7ampM8_zpsfa80e909.jpg[/URL]

It goes full screen on YouTube and most apps, especially in landscape... Feel free to cherry pick whatever you'd like though.

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[BBSeattle]

Cherry pick? Just my observation and opinion with pics to back it up.

It goes full screen on YouTube and most apps, especially in landscape... Feel free to cherry pick whatever you'd like though.

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[zipro]

It goes full screen on YouTube and most apps, especially in landscape... Feel free to cherry pick whatever you'd like though.

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Most apps? I'd say maybe 1-2% of all the apps make use of that. Not even the Kindle app works - the buttons are hidden, but the space is still wasted.

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[bassplayrguy]

Great idea! how does it work with the HTC One? Do you have any pic samples that we could check out?

I first had the HTC One, but exchanged it out yesterday for an S5 (lifted screen). After having the HTC One for a week, and having to pay $35.00 for the restocking fee, i decided to give the S5 a try....try something new. Here are my unbiased thoughts:

The HTC One is absolutely a premium device. Sense was really smooth as it was quick. I'd say it might be one of the fastest phone I've used so far, with the fastest being the N5.
HTC made a great looking phone, the cosmetics of the phone are outstanding, and in my opinion its the best looking phone currently available. The phone was a little tall, but the length didn't hamper the way the phone felt in the hand, it was the material used in combination of the heft of the phone, making it a slippery phone to hold. Screen resolution is good, as well as the Boom Sound. I can't say that I've had a phone with better speakers. Having only a 4mp shooter was a heavy downfall. Yes, it can absolutely take good pics, but the pictures it produced weren't nearly as clear as other high end devices. I put a picture I took of my LG G2 on my computer as well as the same pic taken with the M8, "clearly" details lacked on the M8 and it wasn't nearly as crisp. "Ufocus" was actually great on the M8 and fun to play with, it was prolly one of the only pros of the camera other than shooting in low light.

Now for the S5. It's also an amazing phone...have we come to expect anything but great phones from higher-end Samsung devices? Battery is insane. I've been streaming radio all day so far with it, having only lost like 18% juice doing so. The phone feels great in hand, easy to hold, but being wider its harder to navigate to the left of the screen using the device 1 handed and being right handed. I have to agree with everyone in stating the screen is a beast. Camera is EXCEPTIONAL, I mean, hands down, the camera produces super clear images. Only downfall is the shutter time, which seems to take much longer than the M8, and thats with image stabilization off. I've even tried other camera apps, but the shutter is still slow. But here is where I think I might get flamed posting in the S5 forum. SAMSUNG NEEDS TO CHANGE THE APPEARANCE! Going back to the S2, Galaxy S devices haven't changed much at all. The look of the device as well as Touch-Wiz needs a big revamp. If I spend 600+ on a phone, I want it to be different. The S5 feels like its a Galaxy S4s, like they only made slight improvements similar to the way Apple does their incremental refining on their next edition. Yes, the same could be said for the M8, but they made the screen bigger, and that model has really only come to its 2nd generation whereas the "S's" have been simliar for years now.

Both phones are great, you can't go wrong with either. If you like the way Samsung has been in the past and want a great Camera on your phone, no doubt go with the S5. If you want something a bit more innovative and has more of a premium feel, give the M8 a shot, i can assure you that you will not be disappointed, that is, if you don't take pics much.

sliding your thumb from the edge of the screen to the middle and right back to the edge of the screen should fix that by making the screen smaller and bringing it to the right and repeating the process will put it back.

 

[not_addicted77]

This thread was right on time. The M8 was advertised as 5 inches for display but seeing the pics and in person, i was hoping for a different experience coming from the DNA and the M7. I understand the bezel was for the speakers but still. The width of the screen is irrelevant because the LG G2 shows how a screen should look when it comes to width real estate. Maybe the M9 will get it right. Narrow the speakers maybe?

 

[NYClawstudent]

it looks like the M9 will not be deviating much from the love/hate look of the M8. Those bezels need to go...