HTC has just made its flagship handset for 2015 official — the One M9 — which also marks an end to conflicting rumors about the handset’s design. Sadly, HTC has decided to further refine the One M8’s design for its latest flagship, which means the dreaded black bar at the bottom of the handset with an HTC logo remains on its successor as well.
The One M9 builds on the design of its predecessor and comes with a two-tone metallic finishing, which it claims is an “industry first.” HTC has also moved the power key to the right edge of the handset, which will be appreciated by many existing One M7 and M8 owners.
The only major visual difference between the two handsets is that the camera hole on the One M9 is rectangular in shape, while the M8’s rear camera hole was circular in shape. The One M9 also lacks a secondary depth camera, and thus lacks all the Duo features found in its predecessor.
Under the hood, the One M9 comes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor — an octa-core chip that features four low power Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz and four high performance A57 cores clocked at 2GHz. It also features 32GB of internal storage, 3GB RAM, a microSD card slot and more. On the connectivity side, the One M9 comes with Wi-Fi g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, GPS with A-GPS and more. The size of the internal battery has also increased to 2840mAh, which should translate into a nice boost in battery life as well.
As for the camera, the One M9 comes with a 20MP BSI sensor that is protected by a sapphire glass lens. On the front, HTC has gone with a 4MP ‘UltraPixel’ camera with an f/2.0 aperture and a wide-angle lens. HTC has improved the camera software experience as well and included a new Cloud Gallery that automatically pulls your photos from Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr and other cloud storage services.
On the software side, the One M9 runs on Android 5.0 Lollipop with Sense 7.0 on top of it. The newest version of Sense comes with a lot of new features, and redesigned system apps that adhere to Google’s Material Design guidelines. Like Google Now, the latest version of Sense will automatically display relevant information depending on your location and the time of the day. For example, Sense 7 will automatically suggest you restaurants if you are on a new location. Additionally, it also features support for themes, and allows users to customize them to their liking as well.
Strangely, the navigation bar on the One M9 comes with an on-screen sleep/wake key as well, though HTC did not talk about it.
HTC has also improved the front-facing BoomSound speakers on the One M9 and now they feature 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound.
The HTC One M9 will be available in Silver, Gunmetal Gray, Pink and Gold from the middle of March in Asia-Pacific, North America and other regions of the world.
