HTC's gorgeous, iPhone-like One A9 is now available
The unlocked version from HTC’s site comes with a few extra niceties. HTC’s Uh Oh Protection entitles you to one free replacement within the first 12 months of device ownership due to issues such as a cracked screen or water damage. You also get six months of Google Play Music for free, and four color options including silver, gray, burgundy, and gold. It’s not clear if all four colors are available from AT&T and Sprint.
The impact on you at home: HTC’s latest addition to the One line-up is a beautifully-designed phone, but you’ll want to read our review of the One A9 before you decided to blow $500 on it. The innards are decidedly mid-range, HTC’s Sense UI makes less sense in Google’s material design world, and it comes packed with “interest-based ads” delivered by HTC. That said, you also get a compact phone in the age of palm-stretching giants and the battery life is excellent.
The HTC One A9 features a 5-inch display with 1080p resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 dual quad-core processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of onboard storage. The handset comes with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which means you can designate the phone’s microSD slot as extra internal storage, allowing more space for easy app installs. The handset’s microSD slot supports up to 2TB of additional storage, but keep in mind that designating an SD card as internal storage has some trade-offs, as described by Liliputing.
The One A9 also comes with a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera (the video chat one is 4MP), but in our tests all those megapixels amounted to only a marginal improvement over HTC’s past devices.