Attention Android lovers: HTC’s stylish, ione-like One A9 is officially available from AT&T Sprint beginning Friday. Anyone looking for an unlocked phone can pick it up from HTC.com for $500—although it’s still available for $400 until midnight on Saturday, November 7 (Friday night).
The unlocked version from HTC’s site comes with a few extra niceties. HTC’s Uh Oh otection entitles you to one free replacement within the first 12 months of device ownership due to issues such as a cracked screen or water damage. You also get six months of ay Music for free, four color options including silver, gray, burgundy, gold. It’s not clear if all four colors are available from AT&T Sprint.
The impact on you at home: HTC’s latest addition to the One line-up is a beautifully-designed phone, but you’ll want to read our review of the One A9 before you decided to blow $500 on it. The innards are decidedly mid-range, HTC’s Sense UI makes less sense in ’s material design world, it comes packed with “interest-based ads” delivered by HTC. That said, you also get a compact phone in the age of palm-stretching giants the battery life is excellent.
Under the skin
The HTC One A9 features a 5-inch display with 1080p resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 dual quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of onboard storage. The hset comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which means you can designate the phone’s microSD slot as extra internal storage, allowing more space for easy app installs. The hset’s microSD slot supports up to 2TB of additional storage, but keep in mind that designating an SD card as internal storage has some trade-offs, as described by liputing.
The One A9 also comes with a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera (the video chat one is 4M, but in our tests all those megapixels amounted to only a marginal improvement over HTC’s past devices.
