HTC One M9 specs and details officially released
The HTC One M9 was announced this weekend. And based on articles all over the internet, it would seem the world believes it’s the worst flagship phone HTC has ever released, which confuses me greatly. So I’ll just compare this to the HTC One M8 and we’ll see how it compares for you. I’ll also note that for me it looks like a significant step up.
CPU
(M8 | M9)
- Quad Core 2.3ghz 32-bit | Eight Core (4x2ghz, 4×1.5ghz) 64-bit
Assuming chipset processing being relatively standard, M9 is about 52% faster than the M8 and can run on the slower lower power cores when speed is not an issue.
Camera
(M8 | M9)
- 2 x 4MP Ultrapixel main, 5MP self | 20MP main, Ultrapixel self
HTC’s done away with the main camera being Ultrapixel and moved that to the selfie side. HTC’s taken a really bad beating on the Ultrapixel cameras due to the M7s and their pinkout deaths and people who do a lot of post-photo cropping. This seems to be the perfect fix unless you just can’t stand the idea of a 4MP Ultrapixel camera existing at all.
Storage
(M8 | M9)
- 16 or 32GB | just 32GB
It seems the HTC marketing department has decided not to make the effort to sell you a smaller storage medium that costs 11 cents less than one double the size.
Connectivity
(M8 | M9)
- Bluetooth: 4.0 | 4.1
- USB: 2.0 | 2.0
It appears the rest of the connectivity is the same.
Battery
(M8 | M9)
- 2600 | 2840
I’m not particularly impressed with the minor bump in battery considering it’s still not a replaceable unit. HTC’s claims of power savings don’t really seem to pass the test after you’ve been using the phone for any amount of time so this is a point of contention for me.
Memory
(M8 | M9)
- 2 gigabytes | 3 gigabytes
It is a shame that the memory increase is only 50%. It would be nice to see a day where we don’t even hear the words “Android low memory manager” used again, but it seems three gigs is about the top of the line for the first 64-bit processors at the moment.
With eight cores, gaming-quality video, it feels like that memory should be more in the eight gig range… but I’m dreaming.
Wrap up
Software coming out of the gate should be Sense 7, there are no Google Play Editions that I see mentioned, but considering how Google’s been dropping that project I wouldn’t doubt there will be none forthcoming.
There’s evidently no hardware optical image stabilization included, which seems to have a lot of people let down.
The HTC One M9 is just another HTC phone. It’s significantly better than the last in some ways, but it’s not a revolutionary leap, and I don’t think we should really expect too many more of these leaps from the main players in mass-consumer phones now that devices have advanced so much.
I’d love to play with one of these, but that’s probably not going to be happening any time soon due to freakin’ finances.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is set to be the main Android competitor to the M9. Might be an interesting fight this time.
What do you think – M9 a letdown, or just there’s not that much you can cram into the next version of an already pretty cool device?
