It's time for another One — HTC has
unveiled its latest flagship handset. And,
as reports and leaks had suggested, the
2015 One M9 looks a lot like last year's
M8. The design has barely changed
beyond a relocated power button here
and some refined lines there, and the
screen is still a 5-inch 1080p LCD, but the
phone's internals have been overhauled
completely.
Check out our hands-on with the new
HTC One M9
The One M9 is powered by a Snapdragon
810 octa-core processor backed up by
3GB of RAM. The battery is 2840mAh,
there's 32GB of storage (expandable with
microSD cards), and the front-facing dual
BoomSound speakers remain in place -
this time with Dolby Audio tuning. The
phone runs HTC's Sense Seven skin atop
Android 5.0 Lollipop, which is apparently
hefty enough to reduce the available
storage to around 21GB out of the box.
Joining the gunmetal gray and silver color
options is a new two-tone gold and silver
version.
THE BIGGEST CHANGE IS RESERVED FOR
THE CAMERAS
The biggest change, however, is reserved
for the cameras. While the last two HTC
One phones used 4-megapixel — sorry,
UltraPixel — sensors that sacrificed
resolution for low-light performance, the
M9 goes completely the other direction
with a new 20-megapixel camera that
ditches the gimmicky depth-sensing
second lens. This should at least mean
that the M9 resolves more detail than its
predecessors, but the smaller pixels
probably won't hold up so well in the
dark. UltraPixels haven't been exorcised
completely, though; the front-facing
camera now uses them in an attempt to
improve nighttime selfies.
The One M9 appears to be an
evolutionary upgrade, then, but that may
not be a bad thing — much will rest on
the performance of the new camera, and
it'll be intriguing to see how the
Snapdragon 810 holds up after Samsung
apparently dumped the chip. As ever with
phones, judgement should be reserved
on this one until it's experienced first-