HTC who are financially struggling, appear to be moving away from the premium end of the smartphone market where Apple and Samsung are slugging it out with big budget marketing campaigns.
Last night HTC released the HTC One A9 which is a mid-tier market smartphone that runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, has a mid-range Qualcomm processor, the device will compete head on with the highly popular Idol 3 from Alcatel One Touch. At this stage it is not known which carriers will range the new HTC device.
The 0.29-inch-thick phone features 5-inch AMOLED FullHD 441 PPI display, Gorilla Glass 4, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage, an octacore Qualcomm processor running at 4×1.5GHz+4×1.2GHz, and external microSD Card slot accepting 2TB storage. It also comes with 2,150mAh battery; Qualcomm QuickCharge 2.0 to accelerate charging rates by 40 percent over standard charges.
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It is one of the first phones to run the new Google OS, the others are the 5.7-inch Huawei-made Nexus 6P and the 5.2-inch LG-made Nexus 5X which will be shown to media next week at a Google event in Sydney.
In the US HTC is offering the A9 unlocked from their own web site, at a preorder price of US$399.
HTC will also permit users of the unlocked phones to unlock the bootloader without voiding the warranty, allowing for use of custom ROMs.
The unlocked versions will be available from HTC with a 30-day send-it-back trial period.
The phone is HTC’s first with fingerprint sensor, which supports Marshmallow’s Android Pay app. The device also represents a close collaboration with Google to deliver “the best” of Android and HTC’s Sense UI, and to ship with less preinstalled software than previous models, said HTC America president Jason Mackenzie.
He promised that the unlocked phones would get every Android update within 15 days of the updates being pushed out by Google to Its Nexus phones.
The metal-chassis phone will draw on the cosmetics of the flagship M9 but will add its own touches, including hairline-brushed, bead-blasted finish in four exclusive colours, and precision-cut ridges on the power button so users can locate it by touch.
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The device, which was codenamed both ‘Hima’ and ‘Aero’ prior to launch, runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 617 chipset.
That’s a new mid-tier chip with eight processor cores and 64-bit architecture.
It doesn’t quite broach phablet territory, boasting a 5-inch display with a Full HD 1080p resolution – protected by Gorilla Glass 4.
The handset is svelte at 7.26mm – that’s just thicker than the 7.1mm iPhone 6 – and weighs 143g, which is 5g heavier than the Samsung Galaxy S6.
It’s got an all-metal body with a prominent antenna band – also like the iPhone 6 – and features a fingerprint sensor built into the home button on the front.
The entry-level version of the device has 16GB of storage built-in, with 2GB of RAM also on board. A microSD slot also features, which is good for a theoretical 2TB storage expansion – good luck finding a microSD card that big.
It’s worth noting that in some markets, a 32GB storage/3GB RAM version of the device will be sold.
