Just like the rumors said, HTC One M9 resembles its predecessors a lot… The device saw the light of day today, during an announcement at MWC 2015, with Peter Chou and co on stage. The device is the company’s flagship this year and it’s a bit of a letdown at first sight.
The design is very similar to the predecessor’s with a rounded unibody aluminum case, that’s a bit more compact now. The product has a dual anodization pattern, a scratch resistant coating and sapphire glass on the camera lens. It’s also lighter and smaller, plus it has a single part front bezel. HTC One M9 is available 4 colors: silver with rose gold accent, gun metal gray, completely gold and pink with gold accent.
The device’s specs list includes a 5 inch Full HD screen, the same Super LCD 3 panel from the predecessor. Upfront we’ve got BoomSound stereo speakers, with a bump to Dolby Sound technology. Inside the phone packs 3 GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 810 octa core 64 bit processor, plus 32 GB of storage. There’s a 2840 mAh battery available, up from the M8’s 2600 mAh unit.
HTC also mentions quick charging and support for LTE Category 6 or Category 9 in some markets. The usual GPS, Glonass, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC and WiFi ac are all available here. HTC One M9 supports 21 LTE bands, comes with a new generation of Dot View covers and uses a 20 megapixel camera with 1/2.3 inch sensor made by Toshiba. The camera offers F/2.2 aperture, dual tone flash, 4K video capture, RAW capture and a 27.8 mm lens.
The front camera is a 4 MP Ultrapixel shooter and HTC also promised to offer brand new Zoe apps to go with it. As far as software goes, there’s HTC Sense 7.0 on top of Lollipop, with a bigger role attributed to BlinkFeed. The latter now shows info on the lockscreen and offers suggestions depending on your location thanks to a Yelp partnership.
HTC Sense 7 is also more customizable, with a launcher that supports themes, backgrounds, colors, icons and a custom keyboard. You can also customize the navigation bar. Is it just me or is the HTC One M9 much less impressive than we expected? The device hits the shops this month,but there’s no price yet.