HTC (TPE: 2498) kicked off the 2015 Mobile World Congress with its flagship release for 2015: the One M9.
Visually speaking not much has changed since the M8. The phone retains the same design as its predecessors, with the changes only occurring under the hood. The aluminum unibody has a 5-inch 1080p screen, an Octacore Snapdragon 810 SoC, 3GB of RAM and a 2,840mAh battery (which should last a full day). For cameras, HTC is including a 20-megapixel rear facing camera with a f/2.2, 27.8mm lens as well as the ability to shoot 4K video and a front facing camera with its ‘Ultrapixel’ technology. HTC says Ultrapixel technology allows better low-light photography at the expense of resolution.
The phone runs Android 5.0 Lollipop on top of HTC’s own Sense Seven skin.
The HTC One M9 will be available later this month at $649.99 without a contract and $200 with a contract.
All in all the One M9 appears to be an incremental, rather than evolutionary, upgrade from its predecessor. It’s featureset and pricing its compelling but not anything special. In a market where low-cost high-feature phones such as the likes of Xiaomi dominate, HTC can’t expect sales to be anything special for this phone. It just doesn’t present a compelling case to upgrade for users of last year’s model.
