HTC One M9 officially announced, with 20MP camera, Sense 7 UI and Snapdragon 810

After months of speculation and leaks, the HTC One M9 has finally been made official. There was not much of a surprise when HTC unveiled their new flagship, because of all the leaked information, but there was still enough to complete the picture of what will be known as the new One.

Hardware

With the One M9, HTC introduces its third generation in its premium smartphone design, with a "dual-tone metal unibody". The handset measures 144.6 x 69.7 x 9.61mm, making it shorter and slightly narrower than its predecessor, the HTC One (M8) while retaining its girth and heft. This makes the One M9 as solid in the hand as its predecessor, but easier to pocket.

The One M9 features a 5 inch display with a 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution. HTC has chosen not to follow the Quad HD craze with this year's flagship, thus retaining the same display as the One M8. It shouldnt really matter to the end user, who will still get a crystal clear display which does not heavily impact the battery life of the device.

At long last, HTC has replaced its low-resolution Ultrapixel camera, with a powerful 20MP sensor built by Toshiba. Sony is the only other Android manufacturer known for 20MP cameras, and it will be interesting to see how the two flagships compare. The One M9 camera offers all what you would expect, including backside illumination, real time HDR support and 1080p video capture at up to 90 fps.

The camera specs include a 1/2.4" sensor size, 5384 horizontal and 3752 vertical signal pixels, and 22 fps recording at the sensor's full resolution. The camera unit comes with f/2.2 aperture, 26.8mm lens equivalent, and is, naturally, capable of 4K video recording, too.

The camera does have some unique aspects, like the fact that it offers square pixel, which are a tiny 1.2 microns in size. Like all high-res mobile sensors, Toshiba claims that the sensor "utilizes a proprietary square-pixel design that enables exceptionally high-quality images with low-power consumption."

All of this HTC One M9 performance power is backed up by a fairly generous 2840 mAh battery, which is with 240mAh more capacity than the One (M8), despite the shorter body. Since the One (M8) already scores very well in our battery benchmark, the One M9 should do even better, hitting for excellence. HTC cites 21 hours of talk time in 3G mode, and 17 days on standby, which is pretty good for a flagship. Last but not least, the phone comes with a 1.5A charger, which should top the battery off pretty quickly.

In terms of storage, HTC offers 32GB of internal memory which you can expand by an additional 128GB of microSD. Other features on the device include an IR blaster, MHL 3.0 port at the bottom, which will let you stream 4K footage to your TV with the respective adapter and an updated set of BoomSound stereo speakers. The new speakers promise 5.1 surround sound with full Dolby Audio 3 support, which should greatly thrill audiophiles and movie fans alike.

The One M9 is powered by a Snapdragon 810 chipset, making it the second flagship (after the LG G Flex 2) to offer Qualcomm's latest CPU. The octa-core processor is made up of four Cortex-A57 cores running at 2GHz and another four Cortex-A53 running at 1.5GHz in the big.LITTLE method. The Qualcomm chip has been paired with 3GB of the latest DDR4 RAM, which should ensure an overall silky smooth performance from this handset.

Software

While Android 5.0 Lollipop is the main underlying operating system, HTC has overlayed it with its newest Sense 7 user interface. The new version of Sense has flattened, streamlined graphics to match Google's Material Design guidelines and offers a new theming system which allows users to quickly customize the handset to suit their personality.

Pricing and Availability

The HTC One M9 will arrive later this month, around the world for a price of around $650 (or $200 on contract) which will likely vary across markets and carriers.

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HTC One M9

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