HTC One A9 goes official: brand-new Android Marshmallow, familiar design

After a less-than-successful 2015 flagship, a change of leadership, and a heap of financial troubles, it's obvious that HTC is going to need to change the way it has been doing some things – and change it fast. The company opted to launch another significant smartphone in the second half of the year, but with some tweaks in its philosophy. To get this out of the way – the new One A9 does not try to be a more powerful handset than the flagship One M9. It does, however, try to do things a bit differently, possibly showing us the direction that HTC intends to go in with its future smartphones.

Design

The HTC One A9 is a beautiful, all-metal piece of tech, which measures at 5.74 x 2.79 x 0.28 inches (145.75 x 70.8 x 7.26 mm) and weighs 5 oz (143 g). On its front, it has a 5-inch display, accompanied by a fingerprint sensor at the bottom — something that is new for HTC. The scanner does double as a home button, but there are no hardware navigational keys to be found, however – the phone still emplys Android's virtual buttons for that. Additionally, the handset's bezels are fairly thick, with its screen-to-body ratio falling at 67%.

The One's A9 metal body has smooth, non-aggressive shapes, with rounded-off corners. Its front is entirely covered by a 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 slab and its back is slightly arched towards its ends to ensure an easier grip. Unlike other HTC flagships or higher-end midrangers, the A9 has one speaker, nested on its bottom. Hardcore Android fans will be happy to know that despite the phone looking like a sealed, all-metal handset, it actually has a microSD card slot, which can accept theoretical cards of up to 2 TB.

On launch, the handset will be available in Carbon Gray, Opal Silver, Topaz Gold, and Deep Garnet. Some finishes will be region-specific, so the rumored Rose Gold and Cast Iron may only be sold in select markets.

Display

The HTC One A9 rocks a 5-inch AMOLED panel on its front with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels, bringing its pixel density up to 440 ppi. This should all result in a pretty sharp, dense, bright, and vivid imagery. Of course, the downside is that AMOLED screens can suffer from overblown and inaccurate colors, but we will judge that when we have more time with the handset.

As previously mentioned, the phone's display is protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass 4, spreading on the phone's front edge to edge, and rounding off at the ends to keep uniformity with the metal body's soft corners.