Best HTC One M9 deals
The HTC One M9 is an interesting phone. Some say it's not a huge advancement on the HTC One M8 which preceded it but the company has switched the camera to a new, higher resolution version that aims to produce much better pictures than the M8 did.HTC is a leader in design though, and its handsets are always solid, well-built and reliable. And let's be honest, if you're someone that works phones hard during their lifetime then you'll appreciate the tough metal body of the One M9 - and good news if you're after more data: we've got some ace deals for you.
The camera is, as we said, sharper by far than the dual snapper found in the M8. HTC also made the sensible decision to keep the microSD slot, something Samsung has removed from its recent Galaxy S6 phones.
It does have to be said that, while this phone is ideal for most people, you may want to consider the M8 which is now a great deal cheaper and offers a virtually identical design with many of the features that make HTC's handsets so attractive.
HTC One M9: Fact file
Here's how the HTC One M9 stacks up on paper. The screen is a 5.0-inch SuperLCD3 item with a full-HD 1,920 by 1,080 pixel grid, covered in Corning Gorilla Glass 4. Inside, you'll find a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip. That means four powerful 2GHz cores for heavy duty workloads and another four low-power 1.5GHz cores for when battery life is the big deal.
Camera-wise, we're talking 20MP with HDR support and 4K video capture at 30 frames per second. Nice. The battery is a hefty 2840mAh lump and the whole shebang is cloaked glorious metal and glass. All-in, the HTC One M9 rocks the scales at 157g.
Our verdict
The older HTC One M8 excelled in every area at launch. So is the new M9 a worthy upgrade? Yes and no.
This is a phone that has all the DNA of the HTC One M8 and polishes it well. Theme creator adds a lot of personalization to create an emotional attachment with the phone, and the Sense Home widget seems to be really useful too.
But the new M9 doesn't top quite as many categories, apart from design, where it still shows the rest of the market how to do it. The price is up and yet the discernible upgrades are hardly obvious beyond a better developed camera and an upgrade for the speakers. It's nuanced stuff, not slam-dunk improvements.
If there is a disappointment it's the camera. We expected HTC to show us it really did believe the megapixel myth was something to be resisted, that lower MP counts really do improve image quality in phone cameras. But instead of the next generation of big-pixel sensors, maybe an 8MP Ultrapixel effort, HTC has thrown in the towel and done the same multi-megapixel camera as most of the smartphone market.
Then there's the battery. You might expect next-generation power management in 2015. But the M9 isn't quite there. The slight reduction in battery life is hard to completely understand. The full HD screen isn't any different from the M8, the battery is bigger and the software presumably stable.
Overall, the problem is perhaps one of high expectations. The HTC One M9 is still an excellent phone, filled to the brim with good features, a clever interface and a design that HTC should rightly be proud of, once again showing every other brand how it should be done.
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