Generally speaking, the longer a video has been public the more views it'll get. So things that land earlier in the year usually do better than something that hits in, say, early November.
But 2015 was different. This year we saw the return of ... BlackBerry?
Let's take a quick look at our top 5 videos from 2015, as ranked by your eyeballs on our YouTube channel.
The BlackBerry Priv
Sure enough. Our top video of 2015 — by a wide margin — was Russell's excellent walkthrough video of the BlackBerry Priv. Five minutes and change of the only keyboard option Android has in a smartphone. And let's face it, the Priv was surprisingly good. Not great, but good. A solid effort from a company that hadn't really done much of anything for a long, long time.
The real question going into 2016 is "What's next?" Will BlackBerry survive? It's rumored to have another phone in the works, but would even another solid base hit do little more than feed the fan base while everyone else's market share continues to overwhelm?
Only one way to find out.
Galaxy Note 5 and GS6 edge+
Late summer means it's time for a new Galaxy Note. And Samsung actually dropped the fifth iteration of its once-oversized phone a little earlier than in previous years — just ahead of the new iPhone, actually. And a funny thing happened with the Note 5. It stopped being that oversized behemoth and became, well, just a really good large phone amid all the other large phones. It's got one of the best cameras (if not the best you can find, and it made up for what the Galaxy S6 lacked in the battery department. Plus there's the S Pen, which got even better so long as folks didn't stick it in the wrong way.
The Galaxy S6 edge+, meanwhile, basically was a bigger GS6 edge, which means it had a more acceptable battery capacity. You could argue that the Note 5 and larger GS6 edge should have been all that Samsung released in 2016, instead of the undersized cousins that came earlier in the year.
LG G4
Whereas Samsung is flashy, LG tends to just bang out monster phone after monster phone. That trend really started with the G2 a few years ago, continued in 2014 with the G3, and absolutely did in 2015 with the LG G4. This was one sleek phone with a great camera, and the leather backs were a great option, even if maybe they didn't stand up to the test of time quite as long as we'd like. (And at $70 pop retail, that was quite the hit.)
The G4 was hampered a bit by software, and we're awaiting the Marshmallow update here in the states. But it's still a solid option. And with the LG V10 coming along behind it, we're extremely interested to see what 2016 will bring.
HTC One M9
Remember the HTC One M9? We do. But that's our job. And for a lot of folks not paid to worry about smartphones for a living, the HTC One M9 was a bit of a nonstarter in 2015. But it still garnered enough curiosity to be our fifth-highest viewed video of the year. The body was mostly an iterative improvement over the M8, and the software didn't change much. But the camera continued to fail to impress, even as HTC reverted back to a more traditional single-lens system.
The real question at this point is what happens with the M10 in 2016. Given the design change we've seen in the more recent HTC One A9, will we see the M series depart from that slick curved back for something more flat? Film at 11.
Galaxy S6 and GS6 edge
No. 5 on our list shouldn't be much of a surprise, then. Samsung's annual flagship cycle saw the GS6 and GS6 edge land at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And by most accounts we were impressed at the design choices made after things had begun to feel a bit stale. There's definitely plenty of sex appeal in these phones.
But, again, the battery life just didn't do it for a lot of us. Samsung tried to assuage our fears by promoting the quick-charge capability, which included the dual wireless charging standards. But at the end of the day not having to charge before leaving the office for the day won out over worrying about topping off a few times a day.
Put the internet to work for you.
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