HTC held its “Utopia in Progress” event overnight to coincide with the launch event from Samsung which revealed the new Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge. We now understand that the new flagship smartphone from the Taiwanese manufacturer of smartphones and tablets is the HTC One M9. That follows on from last years M8.
HTC is always planning to make a smartphone that’s the best in the world each year. Even though most still regard the iPhone as ahead of the competition, the other Android-based OEMs do offer stiff competition. The recent iPhone 6 launch was hugely successful and it came at a time where the Samsung Galaxy S5 flopped and the HTC One M8 had its issues too. The main problem for the M8 was a lack of a strong megapixel camera. At last year’s M8 launch, they claimed it as 4 ultrapixels which is away from the usual name of megapixel. Some six months later and most of the media were calling it 4 mega pixels and dropping the name ultra as nothing more than a fad. It was clear that HTC needed to up the anti with the cameras to be a true competitor during 2015. They did just that.
The new HTC One M9 is coming with a 20 megapixel rear-facing camera, a 64-bit CPU, Android 5.0 Lollipop, Sense 7.0 and of course a great deal more under the hood we’ll get to in a minute. Overall, the new M9 is a great smartphone with more of the same. You have a big display, high-resolution display, 4G speed, really high pixel density, 8-core processor and loads of RAM.
Getting into the specifics, the phone sports a 5.0 inch physical display, 1080 x 1920 resolution, 20 megapixel DUAL led rear facing snapper, last years 4 mega pixels features on the front-facing camera, Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 system chip, 8-core, 2000 MHz, ARM Cortex-A57 ARM Cortex-A53, 64-bit processor and the Adreno 430 graphics processor. There’s 32 GB of built-in storage space and an additional 128 GB available thanks to storage expansion slots.
You might already know that the Samsung Galaxy S6 has decided to scrap the micro SD card storage, which means users can only use what’s available built-in. There’s no extra storage available. That’s likely going to send a heap of customers HTC’s way from Samsung who were counting on that extra space. We aren’t predicting a huge shuffle in consumers going from Galaxy to HTC One because Sammy obviously has the figures which suggest that SD card storage isn’t all that popular. That’s understandable because we know most people who complain about there not being enough storage space built-in probably have no idea how to use the SD card for extra storage or don’t bother. Still, taking a look around the forums today shows that it is affecting some people.
Android 5.0 Lollipop is coming out of the box with the M9. That’s the latest version of Android software the folks out of Mountain View have to offer consumers. It did come out last year, but because it was a huge difference from KitKat it came with a great deal of bugs which needed addressing. Users will have a more stable version of Lollipop than those did last year and through the first two months of this year. Overall, it’s not a bad time to be updating to Android 5.0 Lollipop for that reason.