Now it’s here. It is one of the first smartphones that comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. And going back to features, it appears that HTC has dropped a few of them, eschewing hallmarks such as the twin BoomSound stereo speakers in front and replacing them with one bottom-facing speaker.
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We caught up with Roger Entner, principal analyst at Recon Analytics, to get his take on the new smartphone.
“On the outside the A9 looks and feels just like an iPhone with a soft, curved design and premium metal finish”. But let’s take a look at what customers will receive for these sums. As had been tipped in several leaks, the HTC One A9 comes with a physical button that sits below the screen, and a design that is highly reminiscent of the iPhone 6.
Ahead of the One A9 launch, Cher Wang, Chairwoman and CEO HTC, had even claimed that the new One smartphone could be a good “alternative to the iPhone”. Of course, now they’ve moved beyond those designs, but Samsung at its zenith, had phones that looked similar to Apple’s.
It’s set to go on sale at the start of November (there’s no specific date yet), and will initially be available in carbon grey and opal silver, with the slightly flashier Topaz Gold and Deep Garnet colours coming later.
One feature the A9 has that the iPhone 6s doesn’t?
The phone has a 5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 4, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 octa-core, 64-bit processor, 802.11ac WiFi, and Bluetooth 4.1. This is combined with an Adreno 405 GPU.
Following the unsuccessful HTC One M9 that was also launched earlier this year, the Taiwanese mobile company aims to regain a leading spot on the market with the launch of a second “hero” device.
The phone comes with 13 MP rear camera and available in 16 and 32 GB storage choices which can be expanded up to 2 TB via microSD card.
For photos and video, the A9 sports a 13-megapixel camera with built-in optical image stabilization. On the software side of things, there’s something which HTC is calling a “Pro” camera mode, which lets you save your shots in RAW format, something which photographers will be pleased about. Verizon hasn’t made any official announcements of support for the One A9, but HTC says that it’ll work. The battery of the HTC One A9 isn’t exactly impressive though. The fingerprint sensor does more than simply unlock the handset, and that’s largely due to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
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That means small, iterative updates should arrive on the One A9 weeks, if not months, before rivals. The HTC One A9 specs are also astounding and you can easily fool yourself and others that this is an Apple phone but with an Android OS.
