HTC One M9 

It's viewable outdoors and whites are very bright and clean while blacks are decent but not as inky as AMOLED and Super AMOLED displays.

Indeed, the camera captures pleasing colors with good sharpness but it still handles high contrast scenes poorly with blown out whites.

A proven display: While it's not a new panel, the S-LCD3 HTC chose last year still remains a strong contender in the space.

In fact, so far as I can tell, this is the same image sensor and lens setup we saw on last year's phone aside from the addition of the second camera.

The drawback of the 4MP equivalent sensor is the relatively low resolution of photos; there isn't much opportunity for cropping without things becoming a blotchy mess.

Our only complaint is the rear camera; sure the software is very nice but the camera resolution will disappoint the hordes of users who've abandoned point and shoots in favor of capable high resolution camera phones.

We didn't dip below 7 hours of actual screen on time, which is quite good for today's phones... watch out, LG G2 you have competition.

Personally, I was able to get nearly 40 hours out of a single charge on a pretty regular basis.

HTC says you can eek 30 hours out of 10% battery remaining in this mode, which is impressive.

Some menus have been made more visible (Services & Apps is now a dedicated submenu from the settings drop-down), and a brand-new interface for adding new content to your feed has been implemented.

HTC's on-device "HTC Apps" updater is gone, as most of the apps it updated have now been moved to the Play Store (Gallery, Zoe, Dot View, Blinkfeed, TV - other changes are bundled into the "Service Pack" app).

The gist is that this is a lot like the ultra power saving mode on Samsung's Galaxy S5 - data sync is disabled when the screen is off, the screen is super dim, everything is throttled, and you only have access to a very few select apps via a special power-saving interface mode (fewer than Samsung's mode, actually - no Gmail).

We had a hard time killing the 2600 mAh Lithium Ion with a heavy day of use that included streaming video for an hour, using the GPS for a half hour trip, 30 minutes of calls, taking 40 photos and 5 full HD videos and playing 45 minutes of games (Real Racing 3 mostly).

It can shoot 1080p video too, and that means high quality video chat.

The display is even larger at 5" and it's still one of the nicer full HD smartphone panels on the market.