Today, HTC unveiled their most personal, beautiful and powerful smartphone yet. But really, I was hoping that the year taken to develop the HTC One M9 would finally be the brain child of ingenuity that the hype has been building up to be. Instead, all I see is the same outer shell, the same BoomSound grills, the same bezels and the same disproportion between left and right when you hold the phone in landscape mode. Seriously HTC, the least you could have done was center the screen on the phone, I hear a kitten crying in the distance when you try to promote your stereo speakers. I know, I know no one really cares that the screen is off centered and no one really cares that a company claiming to have taken 70 steps and 300 minutes to craft each M9 would care about a detail such as this.
So, let’s see what packed into this metal unibody, shall we? We have our Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core 64-bit CPU as previously hinted, with the first set having four 2 Ghz divisions and the other having four 1.5 Ghz divisions. The RAM amounts up to 3GB along with 32GB of storage although the available capacity will vary according to phone software updates (roughly only 21GB for user storage), but, it does come with a microSD expansion slot of up to 128GB. Other connectivity options include an upgrade Bluetooth 4.1 with aptX, the Wi-Fi module now supports 802.11ac (2.4 & 5 GHz), HTC Connect for some high quality streaming. There is bigger battery at 2840mAh in here as well.
On the outside, we’re faced with HTC BoomSound with Dolby Audio, and the same 5-inch Super LCD3 1080p display on the front. The sensors and front facing camera are in the same spot with an upgrade on the camera up to a HTC UltraPixel shooter (well, they just moved the old back camera and made it the new front camera). On the sides, we now have the unlock button – which seems really low on the body – right below the volume rockers, leaving the top clear for just the IR Blaster. On the back we’re greeted with the new 20MP shooter that is new capable of 4K video recording as well as BSI. I have to commend HTC for listening to my woes (just kidding, they don’t really care about my woes) of the cheap plastic they used on the M8’s camera and covered their new shooter with a sapphire cover. It does protrude a little, but that’s nothing to worry about once you decide to slap an Otterbox on it. Oh, did I mention the screen is still pushed a little off center? If they could put the HTC logo there, they could have at least added in “Back” and “Recent Apps” capacitive buttons while turning the logo into a home button.
Coming back to the 5-inch 1080p display, I would like to commend that HTC has made a bold and smart move, if at all intentional for leaving in the 1080p display. 440 pixels per inch is a lot and I stopped noticing the difference at 330-ish ppi. The upgraded battery would mean better battery life overall and will have less battery drain compared to a QHD display. I wonder if anyone can really tell the difference for anything above 350ppi.
I have been ridiculously excited to get the M9 once it’s been released. But, if I put myself into the shoes of someone who walks into a store to buy a phone, I wouldn’t even take a second look at the M9; I’ll just pass right by it and head over to the Samsungsection. I wouldn’t want to pay for the 70 steps and 300 minutes it took to make this phone, albeit its negligibly lighter and smaller, there is nothing really wow about the design and I am not willing to pay to trade up my M8 for an M9 either. HTC took the “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” strategy a tad bit too far. While brands like Samsung and Oppo are daring to do new things like putting a curved display on a phone or making a rotating camera, HTC doesn’t seem to really care about making their smartphone attract more users. Honest to God, I have no idea what HTC is doing with their approach to this.
It’s painful to feel all my anticipation and excitement for the M9 be crushed so effortlessly, but I have to digress and say that I do not have the actual phone in my hands. I will hold my sorrow and verdict till a time when I have the M9 in my hands to compare to the M8, but from a spectator stand point, the M9 just had its lunch stolen, its head dunked into the toilet and its pants dropped in front of the entire school by the Samsung S6 Edge that was released on the same night. I might actually go buy a Sony to replace my M8 later.
