This smartphone is on fire! Here's our HTC One M9 specs review

Introduction

With the HTC One M9, the Taiwanese maker introduced nothing short of a remarkable successor to the incredible smartphone that was the HTC One (M8). Just like the (M8) came with a bustling spec sheet last year, the One M9 sports the top-shelf hardware of 2015. This muscular set of internals is due for a review and a summation of our expectations from it, so read on - obviously, with a device like this, one has plenty of greatness to look forward to!

Design

At first sight, it's a little bit difficult to tell the M9 and its predecessor apart, but you surely notice that the M9 basically melded the best elements of the HTC One (M7) and One (M8) together! Without questions, this is another extremely impressive smartphone from HTC, and another candidate for the most sharp-dressed Android award. Measuring 144.6 x 69.7 x 9.61mm and weighing in at 157g, it's hardly the slimmest phone out there, but to those of you that prefer their smartphones with a bit of a healty heft to them, it must be a godsend. The HTC One M9 is all metal - no glass (except on the display), no plastic, no compromises. This is how HTC likes it!

Display

The HTC One M9 stands against the Quad-HD craze with a crisp 5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display. We will really have to put it through our display test procedures to get an accurate assessment of its properties, but for the most part, we're sure things will look really really well on it! HTC has had a thing for tuning those displays to come up with natural, if slightly cold colors. It also gets them all nice and bright, so we certainly have some good expectations towards the M9's display performance!

Processor and memory

Continuing its longstanding partnership with US chipmaker Qualcomm, HTC reqruitted its latest creation - the mighty octa-core Snapdragon 810 - to power its 2015 flagship. It also gave it a roomy 3GB of RAM, and by resisting the urge to stick a power-hungry 1440p display on the phone, HTC turned the HTC One M9 into a playground for Qualcomm's fiery dragon! As you may know, this is a 64-bit octa-core monster with four Cortex-A57 cores operating at speeds of up to 2.1GHz, and four Cortex-53 tuned to 1.5GHz. Preliminary benchmarks have shown this SoC has what it takes to power even 4K display devices into excellent gaming and multimedia performance. Thus, we expect really good performance out of the One M9, thanks to its blistering spec sheet and modern components. In addition, the M9 has 32 gigabytes of expandable internal storage.

Camera

The HTC One M9's whopping 20MP dual-tone flash camera is certainly one of the major changes introduced by HTC. It succeeds the HTC One (M8)'s underwhelming 4MP UltraPixel cam - now relocated on the front and playing second fiddle as the selfie cam. The imaging sensor is made by Toshiba and it's said to have square-shaped pixels, which end up being bigger than good ol' rectangular ones and thus have better light-soaking abilities. Now where have we heard that before... oh, well! So far, our experience with the One M9's camera, and the leaked camera samples are both rather promising! As for the UltraPixel camera, it's extra large, light-soaking pixels really have what it takes to land a good selfie even in night time. In fact, the UltraPixel could become HTC's secret weapon that will win the war for the perfect selfie!

Battery life

The HTC One M9 ships with a 2840mAh non-replaceable battery unit, and we are rather optimistic towards its eventual battery test result. A combination of large capacity battery, 1080p display, and modern, power-efficient processor can only lead to an impressive score! Alas, the One M9 seems to be skipping on the fast charging innovations for now.

Expectations

The HTC One M9 is one of 2015's performance beasts, although time will tell whether it will end up as the one to rule them all in benchmarks, games, browsing, and overall processing muscle!