It’s time for another One — HTC has unveiled its latest flagship handset. And, as reports and leaks had suggested, the 2015 One M9 looks a lot like last year’s M8. The design has barely changed beyond a relocated power button here and some refined lines there, and the screen is still a 5-inch 1080p LCD, but the phone’s internals have been overhauled completely.
The One M9 is powered by a Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor backed up by 3GB of RAM. The battery is 2840mAh, there’s 32GB of storage (expandable with microSD cards), and the front-facing dual BoomSound speakers remain in place - this time with Dolby Audio tuning. The phone runs HTC’s Sense Seven skin atop Android 5.0 Lollipop, which is apparently hefty enough to reduce the available storage to around 21GB out of the box. Joining the gunmetal gray and silver color options is a new two-tone gold and silver version.
The biggest change is reserved for the cameras
The biggest change, however, is reserved for the cameras. While the last two HTC One phones used 4-megapixel — sorry, UltraPixel — sensors that sacrificed resolution for low-light performance, the M9 goes completely the other direction with a new 20-megapixel camera that ditches the gimmicky depth-sensing second lens. This should at least mean that the M9 resolves more detail than its predecessors, but the smaller pixels probably won’t hold up so well in the dark. UltraPixels haven’t been exorcised completely, though; the front-facing camera now uses them in an attempt to improve nighttime selfies.
The One M9 appears to be an evolutionary upgrade, then, but that may not be a bad thing — much will rest on the performance of the new camera, and it’ll be intriguing to see how the Snapdragon 810 holds up after Samsung apparently dumped the chip. As ever with phones, judgement should be reserved on this one until it’s experienced first-hand.