HTC One M9 hands-on review

The HTC One (M8) is one of our favourite phones ever. It sat atop our Top 10 smartphones list for a while and was shortlisted for smartphone of the year in the Stuff Gadget Awards 2014, no less.

But it did divide opinion somewhat. Those who loved it really loved it, on account of its beautiful design, superb build and lovely screen. But for some its flaws – namely the much-maligned UltraPixel camera – prevented it from being the best.

The HTC One M9 – no brackets this time – aims to put that right.

Round the back there’s a proper 20MP camera while the design has been refined slightly without losing what made it so special. We’ve already spent a bit of time with it, so here are our hands-on impressions of HTC’s big 2015 hope.

Design & Build

Over the past three years, HTC has milled and beveled itself a reputation for great design and excellent build quality.

This approach has paid off to the extent that even Apple, a company more design-obsessed than a houseful of Scandinavian furniture designers having an argument over a lamp, has made a phone that looks somewhat One-ish.

The last One, the (M8), was designed for feel – apparently designers spent months carrying non-working prototypes in their pockets – and the M9 tries to hold on to this fondlability while retaining some of the more sharply-edged design of the original One.

The result is a phone that’s angular at the front and curved at the back, with sides that are highly polished and finished in a different colour, giving it a slightly different appearance edge-on.

Some will call this design a compromise, and it does look a bit like the M9 was designed by two different people. It does, however, feel seriously well made; HTC tells us that creating the back cover is a 70-step process of coating, machining, beveling and re-beveling. It’s scratch-resistant, buttons have different textures machined on to them, and the rear camera has sapphire glass over the lens.

What I like most about the M9 is something you could call, if you were looking to coin an insufferably smug design term, ‘table presence’. What I mean by that is that some phones make a little whuck noise as they land on a flat surface. It’s the noise of a thin volume of air being pushed out by a screen that’s completely flush with the table. And when you pick it up again, there’s a very faint resistance, like parting thick pages in a hardback book.

Compare how an iPhone 5 sits on a perfectly flat table to how an iPhone 6 or a One M8, and hopefully you should notice it. Possibly not; this might be a weird peccadillo that only I notice, but to me, the table presence of a phone is like the clunk of a car door. It has nothing to do with its function, but everything to do with how much you enjoy using it.

Let’s have specs

Having fondled the M9, you are of course desperate to know what’s underneath its glamorous clothing. And the answer is, much the same as the rest of this year’s superphones – a Snapdragon 810 chip and 3GB RAM, offering easily enough power to cope with the most demanding apps, games, and otter videos.

The screen specs are less futuristic, with a 5-inch 1080p screen offering no display upgrade from the M8. There are two schools of thought on this. There’s the school of thought that it’s a really nice vivid screen and you can’t see the pixels so why waste battery on having more of them; and there are LG G3 owners, who will howl with derision at the idea of owning something with less than a 2K screen.

Tech Specs

Screen: 5.0in, 1080p LCD

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, 64-bit octa-core

RAM: 3GB

Storage: 32GB, up to 128GB more via microSD

Camera: 20MP, f2.2, sapphire lens cover, 4K video recording (back); 4MP UltraPixel, f2.0 (front)

Battery: 2840mAh

Dimensions: 144.6 x 69.7 x 9.61mm, 157g

Colour: Dual-tone silver and gold

On screen

We’ve always though of HTC’s Sense interface as one of the Android skins genuinely worth having, and Sense 7 looks to offer more of what makes Android great – namely, customisation.

The Themes app doesn’t just change a few colours – it reworks your clock, textures, icons, sounds, and fonts. Better yet, you can choose a picture for your homescreen and have the app pick colours and fonts that will suit it. It’s like having one of Stuff’s design monkeys always around to make your phone look a little more tasteful.

Sense Home is also more contextually aware; if it’s lunch time, it’ll show you Yelp reviews from nearby restaurants, and if you cycle to work, it’ll notify you an hour before sunset in case you need to charge your lights.

Boom, shake shake shake the phone

Boomsound would be a great name for a wrestler, or perhaps even Professor Boomsound. He could have a ridiculously huge ’80s boombox on his shoulder, and when he used his stereo to beat his opponent, it would register the impact and blare out B-B-B-BOOOOMMMSOUNNNNNDD!!! He could have a rivalry with Doctor Beats. Definitely some sponsorship potential for HTC there.

Anyway, as you’ll have noticed from the finely drilled grids at either end of the M9, Boomsound is still a major part of the HTC’s flagship. It now comes with Dolby, and thanks to Harman Kardon’s Blackfire protocol, a three-finger swipe can send different songs to different multiroom speakers from the same phone.

Dawn of the Ultraselfie

One of the features that most differentiated the M8 from its rivals was its camera: no 20MP sensor here, but rather an ‘Ultrapixel’ sensor, which uses four pixels to create each dot in the picture, meaning smaller pics but formidable, flash-free low-light performance and a classier shot with more background.

It divided opinion, with some arguing that really, they’d rather just have standard 20MP camera thankyouverymuch.

So has HTC stuck to its guns with the M9? No, it’s had enough of that argument, instead kitting the new phone out with, yes, a 20MP snapper round the back.

This should produce big, proper photos of other people’s faces using an ‘exposure engine’ that we’d guess is similar to the algorithm-based HDR technology used by Sony and Apple. It’ll even shoot 4K video, if you have anything you can watch 4K video on.

Ultrapixel’s not quite dead though: it’s just moved to the front. And that’s no bad thing.

Taking pictures of your own face is, of course, moronic, but taking a selfie with a flash just guarantees that nothing but your own face is in the shot, all your selfies look the same, and all your photo albums will add up to in 30 years’ time is a depressing timeline of your face on its inexorable journey towards wizened, toothless infirmity.

By giving the selfie cam (we hate ourselves for even writing the phrase) an Ultrapixel sensor, you should be able to avoid using the flash and therefore avoid looking quite so rubbish. Though we still disapprove of the selfie concept.

For easy photo browsing, the M9 can collect all your snaps into the One Gallery app, which links your Dropbox/Drive/Facebook/Instagram/Flickr pics into one place (as smaller thumbnails) and makes them searchable. The phone also comes with a free two-year 100GB Dropbox account, so this could actually be a nice way to collate all your various photo-stashes.

Case closed

The (M8)’s Dot View case (pictured) was a fun piece of innovation, and on the M9’s refined, clear-backed design you can actually play Brick Breaker on the case. Which is absolutely crazy, because it turns a 1080p display back into a 1980s calculator game, but it’ll be fun for 20 minutes.

Initial verdict

Other phones may have more to shout about in terms of futuristic features, but the One remains a great example of gimmick-free design, with a smartly made interface and spanking build quality. It’ll be available from 31 March and we’ll hopefully have a full review of it well before then.

HTC One M9 hands-on review