Hi everyone. So, something that people are always really interested in
and it's an area where I myself have levelled criticism
at companies in the past for but that is heat
build-up. Now you might remember when the Galaxy S4 was released I was
very negative on what Samsung delivered there from a heat point of view, the
thermal properties of
well their design, and the cpu-gpu combination they'd use and the
clock speeds they'd gone for meant that you had a device that was useless
for gaming in my opinion
for any longer than maybe 10 to 15 minutes at a time.
The device became far to hot to operate
normally. If you put a case on it quite a bit better but of course then you're building
more internal heat which could reduce the life expectancy of the device overall.
Now gaming is obviously something we're very keen on here and I know
so many people are when they buy Android devices. You know
it may very well be we're a kind of split user base is some respects between those
people who are
only looking at their device as a productivity tool and those people who are looking at it as an
all round entertainment device which includes high quality gaming.
Now when we've been putting this device through its paces and we've put a lot of games through
this device so far in the last three or four days,
we found a common thing. This device
doesn't get overly hot. In fact I would say this has some of the best
thermal properties I've actually seen from a smartphone in the last year.
It's very much comparable to the HTC One before it
although actually I found the heat dissipation seems to be better across the
back of the case
the hotspot as it were is much wider
and cooler than you would get from the original HTC One
and considerably and I really do mean considerably better than
the Galaxy S4. The Galaxy S4's primary problem was the GPU CPU package
and the wifi radio they appeared to be practically either
next to each other or combined within the same chip. Now the problem
there was if you were running the wifi
and running 3D games simultaneously and it was really cranking through
then you would get a massive amount of heat build-up very, very quickly
up to the point where frankly, it was uncomfortable. With the HTC One we found
that the heat build-up is well quite excellent really
and by excellent I mean it doesn't gain incredible hot spots in one corner.
The heat is much more evenly distributed down the casing. Now
a lot of this comes from the fact that we've obviously got this aluminium case. It's
acting like heatsink
in its own right. And it may very well be we have a copper layer
of some sort or another metal layer in here which is acting as a heat
spreader
inside the case as well. Again what this is doing is it is moving the heat from away
from the CPU GPU package and helping to spread it down the case.
It does mean that you get a sort of hot spot around this area
but at no point was it ever uncomfortable. No point did I get
sweaty finger syndrome where I kind of put the device down for a bit, let it cool.
I was able to game quite happily for 30-45 minutes
even up to an hour and no real
major problems here with heat build-up. In fact, you know, overall I would say
this is one of the best devices I've seen for gaming so far. It may not have
the fastest
clock speeds from CPU GPU package for instance
that we will be seeing in the Galaxy S5 in a few weeks time but ultimately
just because you've clocked something higher is not necessarily a good thing if the
chip's thermal properties
mean that at those higher clock speeds it's obviously using a lot more heat.
You're generally also using a lot more power, battery power.
So there has to be a kind trade-off here and the trade-off also has to be about
heat and how comfortable the device is to use over time as well.
For my mind HTC have scored a bit of a winner here. At no point does this device
become too hot to handle
even over those long gaming sessions and the distribution of the heat down the casing
as well
is excellent and hopefully will lead to much longer lifespans
from our CPU and GPU. Heat build-up is a killer.
It lowers life expectancy of devices. Anything we can do to
move that heat away from the source is really beneficial.
Ultimately I think here HTC might have scored an
absolute winner but we'll have to see what the Galaxy S5 delivers.
If it delivers a very similar package that we saw on the Galaxy S4
then I may very well be saying the same thing again - not great for gaming,
gets a bit too warm in those hot spots. HTC you've scored a bit of a winner here as far as I'm
concerned.
We hope you enjoyed this video. Do please remember to LIKE and comment
and if you'd like to, please subscribe. You can also visit our website
and download our Android app. If you do subscribe you'll be getting a daily dose
of the latest tech news,
hardware reviews, Android games, consoles and basically an honest opinion
direct from the UK. Stay tuned, stay Androidizen.