HTC was one of Android's earliest supporters. When the Dream launched
in 2009, little did HTC likely know that its fortunes would skyrocket
in the few years after, along with its share of the smartphone market.
Not long after, though, those fortunes began to wane - with the launch
of the original One series (One X, S, V), HTC's first attempt to rebrand
its smartphone design image began.
The One X was, and I still think is, a beautiful phone.
While the Tegra version was lamentable, the Qualcomm-powered variants
received generally wide praise. The next year, One M7 launched. It, too,
was very good-looking,
and while the Ultrapixel camera was controversial, the phone debuted to
very positive reviews. Then, last year, the M8 happened. With some
significant but generally subtle design tweaks, the excellent Boomsound
speakers, a good 1080p LCD, and a quick Snapdragon 801, the M8 wasn't a
huge upgrade over the M7, but it had its redeeming qualities. At the time, though, many of us wondered: had HTC started to run out of ideas?
With the M9, that's now a real, pertinent question. On paper, a
bigger battery should mean more time off the charger. It doesn't. On
paper, a 20MP camera should finally bring the One M9 in line with its
other flagship competitors. It doesn't. A Snapdragon 810 should bring
considerable speed gains over the year-old 801 in the M8. It doesn't. On
paper, a new version of Sense should mean a real facelift for the
software with exciting new features. For the most part, it doesn't.
The One is the phone only HTC could build, except then they built it
again. And again. And now I'm left wondering: is there a real reason to
buy this thing?
Hardware
Design and build quality
Look at an HTC One M8. Now look at the M9. And that's 90% of our work today.
The phones are so similar that the M9 is best described by what
doesn't make it look like the M8, as opposed to what it looks like
independent of its predecessor. So let's go piece by piece.
The greatest physical change to the phone is, for all intents and
purposes, the area where the frame meets the display glass and speaker
grilles. Instead of a chamfered, polished edge, there is a "stepped"
break in the metal frame that goes straight up and is cut at a 90-degree
angle. HTC says they did this because of complaints that the M8 was too
slippery, and that the "stepped" effect helps it dig into your hand a
little better for maximum grippability. Frankly, I think they did it
because chamfering is more expensive. I don't really notice a difference
when holding the phone, and it is still quite slippery (HTC's expensive
new finishing process also doesn't seem to help, despite what they
claim).
Pictured: edge concerns. I personally think the M8's chamfer looks a bit nicer.
Anyway, the change also meant discarding the One M8's plastic speaker
grilles (really, they are glued-on plastic - I didn't know, either) and
instead building them into the metal around the display glass. This is
one of the few design changes on the M9 that I actually like.
To make up for the lack of a shiny chamfer around the edges of the
phone, HTC has given the front-facing camera a polished metallic ring,
and it looks really weird. I don't know why they did it, but they did,
and it just seems unnecessarily fussy. The enlarged sensor cluster
window also isn't doing the M9 any favors visually.
Along the edges, HTC's buttons have all migrated to the right side of
the phone to create what is likely the biggest button identification
clusterfuck on any smartphone I have ever used. I do not use that word
lightly. I have no idea how such close placement on such crappy,
extremely recessed buttons made it past usability testing. It just
stinks. While you can double tap or slide up to wake the phone, HTC's
solution has never felt as quick or easy as ambient display to me (far
and away the best easy-on display tech of all), and you're still not
going to be able to avoid those truly awful volume buttons. A recurring
theme for HTC, it would seem. They should stop doing that.
My dark gray version doesn't have the two-tone gold/silver thing
going on, so it looks a bit more muted and (I think) tasteful than its
shinier sibling. Around the back, the only difference worth highlighting
is the camera module, which now sticks out slightly from the frame, and
is square. Subjectively, I find it kind of an eyesore, preferring the
slicker recessed look on the M8's duo camera (irrespective of duo
camera's actual merits, which were precisely zero). I really have no
idea why the rear camera module has to be that... visible - the phone
would look so much cleaner with an iPhone-sized circle, but I'm guessing
it has something to do with convincing consumers that this is a
"serious" camera for "serious" photography, because it is big, and big
things are very serious.
HTC has retained the microUSB and 3.5mm port arrangement from the M8
to the chagrin of OCD sufferers everywhere (really, can an off-center
USB port be part of your "brand"?), and while generally harmless, are
bound to stir up the opinions of many people on the internet as things
of this nature always do. The black plastic antenna window for the GPS /
IR up top is still present, and still gives the phone kind of a
space-age accent, though it's a little more angular and less
refined-looking than the one on the M8.
Antenna windows to the soul
So, here's the thing: I really liked the look of the One M8 when I
reviewed it last year. The One M9 does have some positive changes
(aforementioned speaker grilles now being metal, reduced height of the
HTC logo black-bar), but almost every other physical design change, for
me, comes down on the slightly-to-moderately-negative side of the board.
The camera hump, the stepped metal instead of a chamfered edge, the
ugly little chrome accent on the front-facing camera, and the new
buttons (especially the buttons) - they all get an "oh, well, why did
they... do that?" kind of response from me.
Does it make the M9 hard to like as an
object? Not particularly, but it does make it
less
likeable than the phone that preceded it, which is always going to
amplify the impact of such changes. And it makes flaws carried over from
the original more noticeable. The HTC "black bar," while it allegedly
has to be there for display controller guts, makes the phone quite tall.
So do the Boomsound speakers, which require small resonance chambers to
produce mid-range and bass. The all-metal design is still really
slippery. The phone itself doesn't look especially different from the
One M7 of two years ago, and all claims about "timeless design" aside,
that does make it feel less special to me.
But, a lot of this is subjective, and I realize
that. So, if you liked the One M8's design and build quality, you'll
like the One M9's aside from the aforementioned hardware buttons, which
are
objectively bad. Everything else really is a quibble, but
when you're talking about design, nothing is truly trivial, so that's
why I nitpick here - because this section is literally about nitpicking.
Don't tar and feather me, please.
As to the actual quality of the phone, I wouldn't say it's
substantially better or worse than the M8. The M8 is a solid-feeling
device, and the M9 feels quite solid as well, and that is because they
are both encased in very hard aluminum chassis. The thing is, between
those new hardware buttons - which are just plain not good - the camera
hump, and the strange stepped metal around the edges of the phone, the
M9 ends up
feeling almost paradoxically less nice than the M8.
Also, let's not go out of our way to necessarily confuse "solid
metal" with "actual quality construction" - last year, iFixIt gave the
HTC One M8 a horrendous repairability score of 1/10 (an iPhone 6, by the
way,
gets a 7/10) because it is essentially
an un-disassemble-able screwless mess of evil. This year, HTC has added a couple external screws, but the glued-in internals like the battery and display
still require heat gun coaxing
in order to remove, and there's still a whole mess of tape, ribbons,
and easily damaged copper foil shielding in there. (Samsung's Galaxy S6,
by the way,
requires similar coaxing, though appears substantially less complex overall.)
Display
The M9 and M8 have fairly similar 1080p LCDs. The main difference
between the two seems to be tuning - the M8's display looks much more
saturated and bold than the M9's, which appears to have been tuned much
cooler than its predecessor. The maximum brightness seems almost exactly
the same, the viewing angles are nearly identical, and outdoor
visibility has them in a dead heat. The minimum brightness setting on
the M9 is appreciably lower, though not by a lot, so there is that.
It's not a bad screen, by any means, but it's basically similar in
most ways to the one HTC has been shipping since the M7. It's a good,
solid, 1080p LCD... that pretty much any manufacturer can buy these days
if they so choose for a fairly reasonably price. It's not that I'm
saying HTC should opt for a 2K (QHD) panel, or that they have to go
AMOLED to stay relevant, but there's little denying that competitors
like Samsung and Apple have surpassed HTC in the display game, and that
it didn't exactly happen
recently. HTC is at the mercy of
suppliers while Samsung, Apple, and LG develop their own panel designs
and get the pick of the litter if they don't. And meanwhile, budget OEMs
like OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Huawei are sourcing panels of a similar if
not better quality while selling phones that are much less expensive.
HTC wasn't keen to talk up the screen on the One M8 last year, and
they were similarly reluctant to do so on the One M9 this year. While I
have absolutely no problem with the M9's 1080p resolution, Samsung is
clearly leading the industry in smartphone displays right now. The
latest Super AMOLED panels have superior minimum and maximum brightness,
insanely good color reproduction (when set to the right display mode),
and surprisingly good outdoor visibility thanks to their excellent
contrast. The One M9's display has OK color reproduction (pinks get a
weird magenta-purply thing going on, greens are definitely a bit hot,
whites and grays too cool), decent brightness, and pretty good viewing
angles. If you're looking for the cream of the crop when it comes to
display quality, unfortunately, it's just not here.
That said, I still prefer the M9's panel to LG's G3 or even my own
Nexus 6
(ugh yellow). While it falls short of the Note 4 or, if I'm honest,
even the Galaxy S5 (... or even the Note 3), it's still a decent screen
and I don't think it's going to upset anybody. Also, I do commend HTC
for sticking it out at 1080p
when it makes sense to do so - whereas other manufacturers are pushing 2K mostly because they can.
Battery life
"Unsettlingly mediocre" is how I would describe it. The One M9 has
given me range anxiety I haven't really experienced since, well, the
Nexus 6, and even then that's only on some days with that phone. Even
HTC's data sleeping doesn't seem to be working right, with my phone
showing many wake states during the middle of the night when emails come
through. Previously, on the M7 and M8, sync would basically stop
between the hours of 11PM and 7AM unless you actually turned on the
display, which was a huge battery saver if you forgot to plug in your
phone overnight.
On the M9, I'm just not happy with the battery life as it is right
now. I don't know if that's to do with the Snapdragon 810, poorly
optimized software, or just plain bad luck, but it's not fantastic. It
could be worse, but if I was taking this thing on the road every day to
and from work without a charge until I got home, I'd probably be buying
an external battery pretty quickly. It's just not where it should be.
Sense also doesn't allow you to see the amount of screen-on time in
the OS's power usage UI, so you can't really get a good feel for what
amount of screen-time your usage habits will allow for. Even when
loitering on Wi-Fi in my apartment (which yes, does
decrease
power consumption), the idle battery life just does not seem very good.
The only other phone with Snapdragon 810 that I've used is the G Flex 2
and, despite having 160mAh more capacity than the One M9, it too fell
flat fairly quickly.
While the unpredictability has settled out some since I received the
phone last week, I'm still not happy with how the M9 stacks up here. The
moment the solution to a battery life problem becomes "turn on
power-saving feature X," you've lost me. I'm not interested in
compromising the experience simply to extend the amount of time I have
to keep a phone off the microUSB teat, unless I urgently need to
preserve that remaining juice. If there was one area where HTC could
really put a thorn in the side of Samsung, LG, or Motorola (barring the
Maxx), it would be in class-leading battery life, but the One M9 sadly
fails to deliver anything of interest here, and frankly falls slightly
below the bar I'd expect of a flagship handset. This is definitely a
step back from the M8, which I found had pretty great battery life
overall.
Storage, wireless, and call quality
HTC came to bat with 32GB of storage standard on both the M7 and M8
here in the US, and that was a significant plus for consumers burned by
the 16GB-only Galaxy S4 and S5 here in America. But now that the S6
ships with 32GB minimum and LG isn't letting its flagships fly with less
than that amount, either, HTC's advantage here is a bit diminished. A
microSD card slot is a plus with Samsung seemingly having forsaken
expandable storage at the flagship level, but only to those who would
utilize it to begin with.
Sense 7 weighs heavily on that 32GB, too, which is a real shame -
this T-Mobile One M9 ships with less than 20GB available out of the box.
Let me rephrase that:
if HTC shipped a 16GB One M9, you would have 4GB of space to work with. This
is just bad bloat management. The Galaxy S6 ships with 23GB (depending
on carrier) available, and last year's bloat-tastic 16GB S5 even managed
a little over 10GB.
Certainly, around 20GB of space is going to be enough for most
people, but that doesn't excuse the lackadaisical attitude HTC has
approached the bloat problem with - it smacks of apathy, or worse,
incompetence. Compared to a T-Mobile One M8 running Lollipop, the One M9
is shipping with nearly 2.5GB less user-available storage, and for
what? Things most of us will never use?
Wireless performance on my One M9 review unit has been entirely
respectable, I've experienced no issues with mobile data or Wi-Fi.
Bluetooth has given me one problem, though it's somewhat rare - my Wear
device (a G Watch R) occasionally loses sync with the phone, an issue
I've decidedly
not had with the five-plus other devices
I've paired it with. It hasn't happened in the last day or so, though,
so perhaps Google corrected something on its end.
Call quality is phone-like. I haven't tested HD voice on the M9, but
I'm going to guess it sounds like HD voice on pretty much any phone:
much, much better than regular phone call quality.
Audio and speakers
HTC's Boomsound speakers have some new Dolby tuning this year, but
honestly, my ears can barely hear the difference. The One M8 had a great
set of front-facing speakers for a phone, and the M9 still has those
same great speakers that actually produce a semblance of mid-range,
something you don't get on any other smartphone that I know of. The
hardware, according to HTC, is the same - and the sound supports that.
The M8 and M9 sounds basically identical.
Headphone audio presented no problems, and is still the same high
quality that I've come to expect of Qualcomm's top-tier Snapdragon
chipsets to date.
Camera
HTC's new camera is a bit of a mess on the One M9. After two-plus
years pushing the 4MP Ultrapixel sensor, it's unfortunately clear that
HTC is having trouble handling the somewhat odd
20MP Toshiba
sensor it's using for the one M9, as opposed to the much more
industry-standard Sony IMX sensors used in pretty much every other
high-end smartphone.
It does not seem to have been a good idea to do this.
You see, HTC apparently has decided that, despite no
longer having a 4MP image sensor in its flagship phone, that it still
wants to process 20MP images like they have 4MP of resolution. What I
mean by that is, the processing seems optimized heavily for viewing on
small displays. Fine detail is most charitably described as "present,"
while image noise and processing is brutally aggressive, especially in
low light.
This is not a very tight crop, trust me.
The cropped image above is representative of the two
problems I had with the M9 in low light. First, the focus never, ever
seems right. You always have to tell it where to focus, wait for it to
do so (which takes far longer than it should), and then wait for the
capture, which also takes annoyingly long as the camera then tries to
focus again. Once you get a picture, sweet jesus, there is going to be brutal
processing noise and artifacting in anything but daylight. The launch
time for the camera is also lamentable, at anywhere from 1-4 seconds
depending on how the phone is feeling, I guess.
During the day, performance isn't outright bad, but the
images I captured were never particularly impressive in detail, clarity,
or color reproduction (most were quite bland). This is the most
mediocre camera fitted to a high-end smartphone in the last year, I
think - it is simply not in possession of any real redeeming qualities.
Even in direct sunlight on a clear day, the sky still has processing noise. HTC is also lightyears
behind Google and Samsung in terms of HDR performance, a mode which I
found basically useless on the M9 for all the hilariously false contrast
it forces into an image.
Still, this is a notably better camera than the One
M8's, because it actually has fine detail, whereas the M8's Ultrapixel
had what I would describe as coarse detail at best. When you're
coming from a camera as difficult to defend as the duo setup, though,
it's hard not to improve in at least some ways. The One M8 also had the
single worst HDR mode of any smartphone camera I have used in years, so
even the M9's weirdo HDR processing looks better than that of its
predecessor, shown below.
The camera itself adds no real new features aside from
4K video, loses HDR video mode, and does not have optical image
stabilization. All in all, HTC has delivered a camera that wouldn't
stack up particularly well to 2014's flagships, let alone 2015's. This
is not a high point for a company that claims to be deeply invested in
the imaging experience on its smartphones. Some of the M9's camera
issues can likely be resolved in software, but for now, it simply
doesn't meet the bar I think we'd expect a 2015 flagship to.
Here are some additional sample photos.
Software
Performance
Without a doubt, the most controversial section of any One M9 review
you will read is the one in which device performance is discussed.
Having been extensively involving myself in the Snapdragon 810
drama
of late, I'd like to begin this section with some questions and answers
that I think will help serve as a primer to this discussion.
- Does Snapdragon 810 overheat in the HTC One M9?
It's a loaded question. If you run benchmarks like Geekbench 3 ad
nauseam without any cooldown periods between runs, then yes, the One M9
will get very, very, very hot. The highest temperature I observed with a
true IR camera was 118F (nearly 48C), which is hot enough that no, you
don't want to hold the phone (not dangerous, just uncomfortable). No
plastic bags, no bright lights, just my desk in my apartment and
Geekbench 3 over and over and over. No other phone I've tested gets that
hot, the maximum I saw was 110F... on another Snapdragon 810 phone.
- But it still works, so that's not overheating, right?
Technically, yes. An "overheat" state is one that implies the device
must cool lest imminent damage occur to it. In that sense, no, the M9
does not appear to overheat - I never got a message from the phone
saying it needed to turn off or anything to manage the temperature.
Granted, a modern CPU can operate at upwards of 80C without risking
damage, so "overheating" is an exceptionally relative term here.
Smartphones go into "overheat" states to prevent damage to the battery
and display, not the processor.
- Does this happen in regular usage? The M9 will get
pretty toasty when the cellular radio is very active (lots of DL/UL) and
the phone isn't sleeping, or GPS is running with navigation. And it
gets hot more quickly than I'd anecdotally expect. But no, it doesn't
get crazy hot in anything but benchmarks.
- So you're saying it doesn't matter? No. Because the
reason it gets so hot in benchmarks is because it's not throttling the
CPU almost at all, instead letting the phone get hot so that high scores
can be achieved repeatedly during testing.
- So it throttles? Absolutely. While Snapdragon 810
is unofficially rated at 2.0GHz (note that Qualcomm never published a
clock speed for 810) for its high-speed A57 quad-core cluster, you'll
never see it get over 1.5-1.6GHz in regular usage for more than
sub-second bursts, and even, then, probably not over 1.8GHz. The same
behavior can be observed on LG's G Flex 2, which also uses the 810.
- Does this matter? Yes. Compared to the
Snapdragon 801 and 805, which throttle much less often in regular usage,
the Snapdragon 810 is far more likely to compromise performance under
such usage, meaning the experience it provides frankly doesn't seem
appreciably better than those chips and, in some applications, may
actually be worse.
Is the One M9 a slow phone? No. But it's not really even
appreciable quicker than the One M8, and in some cases, I actually
noticed it to be slower (app switching, for example). And yes,
Snapdragon 810 will beat 805 and 801 in benchmarks - HTC has ensured the
processor will not throttle during benchmarking, so the scores will
tell you what you'd expect for a chip that's a year newer than the one
which preceded it. Benchmarks, of course, are not reality.
So,
why go with the 810 at all? Why not stick it out with 805, which has
proven itself a solid, reliable chip even on high-resolution
smartphones?
The simple answer is marketing, and it's the same story I hear from
every OEM I talk to about chipsets. Consumers want to know they're
getting the latest and greatest, and even if most people don't know
squat about what a processor or chipset is or what they do, there's a
big enough group of buyers (especially online and in emerging markets)
to matter that having the latest Qualcomm part is paramount to
competing. HTC chose Snapdragon 810 not because it is "the best" chipset
available from a performance standpoint, they chose it because it is
"the best" chipset available from a marketing perspective. That is the
slightly sad reality of the situation, and that's why Peter Chou got on
stage at MWC to be Qualcomm's PR puppet.
And what else can they do? There was no other option: shipping with
805 would have had them laughed out of the room by internet spec geeks,
and there is no other viable alternative to Snapdragon 810 yet. Intel
has no high-end LTE SoC, there's no chance Samsung would give HTC a
crack at the latest Exynos, and NVIDIA is a non-option in phones.
Mediatek doesn't compete well in the LTE space right now, either, and
that's Qualcomm's real stranglehold on partners: radio technology.
HTC, like LG with the G Flex 2, basically had a choice of shipping
with a newer, compromised chip, or shipping with an older, proven chip.
In a market with obsessive 1-year refresh cycles and constant
specification warring, the older chip was never a realistic
business
option. This isn't HTC's fault - only as much as they can be faulted
for sticking it out with the single viable high-end LTE chipmaker on the
market. So, blame Qualcomm, blame ARM, and certainly blame
specification hypebeasters, but HTC really is just a victim of a rare
product portfolio miss here, and one that has Qualcomm noticeably shaken
up.
To HTC's credit, I haven't noticed any truly unusual lag or
stuttering on the One M9, which for the most part appears to perform
fine in most situations. It's just not any noticeably faster or smoother
than the phone and chip it replaces, and at this point, it's incumbent
upon Qualcomm to show that 810 isn't compromised in practice, because
the relevant data points we have for real-world devices to date show
that it is. Even Qualcomm's marketing makes it clear something's wrong -
they haven't published an advertised clock speed for Snapdragon
810 (yet they have for
800,
801, and
805),
and it's because they can't advertise one, since the real clock speed
is basically dependent on how ballsy and willing to compromise battery
life (and cycle longevity, because heat) the OEM is.
So, if you want a basic rundown of the One M9's performance, here it
is: it's pretty fast. It's not noticeably faster than the One M8, and
it's sometimes a bit slower, which wouldn't be in and of itself quite so
bad if the battery life hadn't also taken a real hit. For what it's
worth, it does not feel as slow and janky as the 810-powered G Flex 2,
which appears to have significantly more aggressive throttling policies,
so there is that.
Sense 7
Have you used Sense 6 on Lollipop? Great! You've basically used Sense
7. The changes between the sixth and seventh iterations of HTC's
proprietary skin are few and far between. For example, the notification
bar has slightly less vertical height. Yes, that is how nitpicky we need
to get to really highlight changes.
The Sense clock widget is new. There's a new widget called Sense Home
that... really isn't that interesting (it's a glorified folder widget).
There is now a vaguely Holo-esque tab interface for switching between
pages on stock HTC apps, which looks different-y. BlinkFeed has
restaurant suggestions now.
Pictured: the biggest UI design change in Sense 7.
Oh, they changed the multitasking interface back to the old Sense
style, too. You see, when the One M8 got its Lollipop update, HTC tossed
in a very slight tweak of the stock Android 5.0 multitasking UI. On the
M9, they decided they didn't like that anymore and went to the
grid-layout and added pagination to it. And, of course, they added back a
button to clear all recent apps, because people do this, ostensibly for
the placebo relief it provides.
The one headlining new feature of Sense 7 is the theming engine,
which allows you to apply your own or community-created themes to your
device. HTC's definition of theme can be a bit generous depending on
your expectations, though it's still significantly more than really any
other OEM gives you. You can choose wallpaper, icon pack (including a
texture overlay), color palette (also including texture), sounds, and
font. There's a theme store to download them from (same as the Dot View
store), or you can create your own and publish it.
This is definitely nice for those people who like to theme their
device to a mild to moderate degree (I am personally not among them),
and it's not something the other major device OEMs are offering. I will
say the one issue I had is with theme discovery - it's hard to really
search the theme store in a meaningful way unless all you really want
are the promoted and popular themes.
The other customization tweak HTC has added, though not original, is
for the layout of the navigation buttons. You can add new buttons like
turn off screen, auto-rotate, a notification toggle, or hide nav bar.
You can also change the order of the buttons. You just get the buttons
HTC gives you, though, there isn't any kind of option to brew-your-own
button.
Other than that? HTC's added some new options in its photo editor, an
app called Cloudex that basically just puts your cloud photos in the
Gallery app, and... I can't really think of anyone else. The promised
camera store, by the way, currently has a whole three options in it, and
the purported "pro" mode that would allow RAW capture is not yet
present.
Most of the changes in Sense 7 seem superficial, aside from the theme
engine, and even the superficial changes can come off as tweaking for
the sake of tweaking. Like the new tab navigation style in HTC's stock
apps - it just seems like it was changed because they needed some way to
differentiate the new software from the old software. It doesn't serve
any kind of
cohesive purpose. Meanwhile, Google's Material
Design initiative is still nowhere to be found in Sense, with HTC's
likely retort being that Sense is a "full-package" software identity
that it does not want to cobrand into something
Googly. And yet
the more and more 3rd party apps adopt at least some material elements,
the more and more out of place HTC's software will look. I predict
we'll see them come around a bit with Sense 8.
Conclusion
The HTC One M9 is problematic. It's not a bad phone, but it's also
not a great one, and it doesn't feel so much better than last year's
device that an upgrade would be even remotely necessary for current One
M8 owners. Even One M7 owners aren't missing
a whole lot here,
and that's slightly unsettling. The display is the same if not
observably worse in certain respects, the Boomsound speakers are the
same, the battery life isn't any better (worse, actually), and there are
no major new hardware features to speak of. Sense 7 offers little aside
from its theming engine, and while that's certainly a fun addition, it
doesn't really strike me as a big value-add. The camera does offer you a
little crop breathing room now, but as high-end smartphone cameras go,
the One M9's is totally unremarkable, and in some cases a bit
disappointing.
So, that leaves us with things like the Dot View case, HTC's Uh-Oh
protection, and the company's Android OS update track record for selling
points. While they're all certainly benefits, are they going to be
enough to get the interest of anyone but those people who are already
HTC fans? That's kind of my problem here: I see no special appeal for
the One M9 among users of non-HTC phones. The M9 brings nothing truly
compelling to the table that the M7 and M8 before it did not, and
neither of those devices were runaway sales successes.
With Samsung having given us a play-by-play
Extreme Makeover: Smartphone Edition
on its Galaxy S6, the One M9 provides a counterpoint of, "Hey, things
are still pretty good over here, don't fix what ain't broken!" The
problem for HTC is that, from a business perspective, things
are
broken. HTC's ever-decreasing market share and recent CEO shakeup make
it obvious the Taiwanese OEM is not able to bring in significant numbers
of new customers, or more importantly, pull them away from other
brands.
Perhaps a mid-year refresh or high-end Note competitor with a fresh
new look will reinvigorate HTC in the premium phone space, but as things
stand now, it feels like we're in a holding phase, just waiting for
something to happen.
copied from androidpolice.com
