LONDON: So far we know very little about the HTC One M9. In fact aside from the possibility that some of the features from the MIA HTC One M8 Prime might make it across, we don’t really know anything at all.
That phone was supposedly going to have a QHD display, a Snapdragon 805 processor, 3GB of RAM, a waterproof body and more megapixels in the camera, all of which would make sense for the HTC One M9, but we’ve heard no mention of them in relation to it.
Still whatever its specs end up being we’re sure it will be great, after all the HTC One M8 is sitting pretty at the top of our list of the ten best phones in the world. Not even the iPhone6 could unseat it and we were similarly fond of the prestine HTC One last year.
News and rumors
There’s very little on the ground at the moment regarding the revision of HTC’s flagship – albeit most of the conjecture looks homogeneous to it will probably be right.
HTC will probably utilize the next-gen Snapdragon 805 chipset from Qualcomm as it looks to further amend battery life, and while rumors are tipping a QHD screen, that might be too far for a brand that doesn’t relish to max out specs very often.
The fascinating news from sporadic-leaker @upleaks has verbally expressed that HTC will drop the M9 moniker – presumably to go just back to the One brand, with the older model off sale. We’re not convinced, not just because the source hasn’t given any reason to back up the facts, but withal things might get perplexing for the consumer.
That verbally expressed, it wouldn’t be a deplorable thing, given the M8 suffix isn’t the most alluring.
Release date
As for when we’ll see the HTC One M9, that’s something that we can at least take an educated guess at. HTC tends to release its flagships within a few weeks of MWC, which next year is happening on March 2-5 and the HTC One M8 was announced on March 25 2014, so we expect the HTC One M9 will be announced sometime in March.
Hopefully it will be worth the wait, because as good as the HTC One M8 is, it isn’t perfect, there’s always room for improvement and technology has moved on since it launched, so with that in mind here’s what we want to see in the HTC One M9.
Two day battery life
We were pretty impressed by the battery life of the HTC One M8, but the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Sony Xperia Z2 had it beat, while it looks like the Sony Xperia Z3 and the Xperia Z3 Compact might well widen the gap even further.
So we’d love for the HTC One M9 to have more juice. We don’t think two days of battery life should be unrealistic, after all the HTC One M8 and a number of other phones can already comfortably make it into a second day, they just need a bit of a boost to make it to the end of the day.
If HTC can deliver even more than that then great, but we’d be happy with two days, at least until the M10 comes around.
A better camera
The HTC One M8 is great in low light as its lens lets more light in than competing smartphone cameras, but when you’re trying to take photos in bright conditions all the extra light it takes in actually seems to work against it, causing the image to over-expose.
On top of that it’s only got a 4MP sensor, which is fine when you’re just viewing shots on your phone, but blow them up and there’ll be noticeable noise.