Dubai
HTC’s One M9 is a beautifully-crafted smartphone with a unibody zero-gap aluminum shell and with a dual-tone colour feature to stand out from the crowd, but it isn’t a drastic overhaul from M8.
M9’s design is a mixture of M7 and M8. The design has been slightly refined without losing what made it so special, but you need to take a closer look.
M9 is thicker than M8 as it sports a bigger battery inside. The power button has moved to the right side of the device rather from the top, just below the volume buttons and has given some texture to differentiate by touch alone.
HTC claims that the back cover is a 70-step process of coating, machining, beveling and re-beveling to make it scratch resistant and give it a jewelry-esque premium look.
The five-inch Full HD IPS device (441 pixel per inch density) is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 64-bit octa-core processor, with four cores clocked at 2GHz and four at 1.5GHz, coupled with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage capacity. It can be expanded to 128GB using micro SD card slot.
HTC has stuck to the same Full HD display as in M8 when the whole premium smartphones are moving to 2K display.
The HTC’s user interface – Sense 7 – has made substantial changes to the Android platform to make it more appealing and features more customizable options than ever.
With the Themes app, users can change the colours, textures, icons, sounds and fonts while the Sense Home provides users with news, stories, recommendations about apps tailored to their needs. It collects, accesses and uses a s variety of information depending on the location. It uses the work and home address (provided by the user) and collects the information for the users.
If the user is in the office, the Sense shows, Microsoft mail, Calendar, Scribble, Drive, Goggle apps folder, play store and apps suggestions while out, it shows Music, Calendar, Maps, Car Navigation, Google apps and Play Store, and shows Music, calendar, YouTube, Twitter, Google apps and Play Store while at home. The section changes depending on the GPS location.
The major change done on this device is the camera section.
Motion Launch Gestures are still part of Sense, which means that users can do handy things like double tap the screen to turn it on and off. Up, down, left and right swipes will unlock, turn on voice dialling, launch the widget panel and open BlinkFeed respectively – all with the screen off. The volume button can be used to launch camera.
HTC has bumped up its camera specs compared to its predecessor with 20MPwith f2.2 aperture and with dual LED (white and amber). The lens covers is made of scratchproof sapphire glass.
It no longer has the dual camera setup as in M8. The app is simple as it has camera, selfie and panorama but users can add effects like Bokeh for capturing with depth of field; Split captures photos taken with both the front and the back camera on and photo booth captures four photos in a grid. The M9 crops the snaps to 16:9 ratio by default.
The photos taken with the device are great with details and colours and it can record 4K videos. You need to have a 4K TV or monitor to watch it. Even zooming in on the HTC One M9’s screen showed lot more details.
The front camera is 4MP ultrapixel with f2.0 aperture to work in low-light conditions.
It does work great in low light and good for great selife.
The One Gallery, powered by Cloudex, allows users to see all the photos and videos in one place from Dropbox, Flickr, Google Drive and Facebook.
The gallery lets users search by date, location, event, album or even the images themselves with Image Match option. The One Gallery feature is really useful for people like me as I take lot of photos on my camera and later find it difficult to search for a particular picture when needed.
The Boomsound stereo speakers on the front are still a major part of the HTC’s flagship. It now comes with Dolby Digital virtual surround sound effect.
The Harman Kardon’s Blackfire protocol in HTC Connect feature lets users use a three-finger swipe to send different songs to different multi-room speakers from the same phone while a reverse gesture will bring it back.
Regarding connectivity, it has 11ac dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, 4G LTE, WiFi Direct, DLNA, hotspot and an IR blaster.
It does not have fingerprint scanner, wireless charging or heart-rate monitor and HTC just focused on improving its existing hardware and software segments.
The non-removable battery is gained bumped up to 2840mAh compared to 2600mAh in M8. Even under heavy stress, the battery for more than a day and lasted for couple of days on average usage patter which is pretty excellent. HTC still offers power saving features to extend battery life when needed.
It will be available in dual-tone silver and rose gold, single-tone gunmetal grey, single-tone gold and dual-tone gold and pink colours. It is priced at Dh2.749 and availability by end of the month. An exclusive rose gold version will be available exclusively for a limited period. If you break your phone within one year, HTC will replace the device with a brand new one free of charge.
