Gadgetory

HTC returns with a phone that will be talked about for a lot of different reasons but are they good or bad reasons what we're going to find out because it's Josh of agar from Android authority what's going on everybody and this is the HTC One a9 much of what you may remember from the HTC One line is quite different now a smaller overall body brings quite a bit of symmetry rounded sides and quarters along with a 2.5 D glass over the screen make this phone feel really smooth in the hand but the 5-inch screen also helps with overall design making the a9 very easy to handle the buttons are all on the right side and they come opposite the sim and microSD card slots and all the ports as well as the speaker grille are on the bottom moving up front there is one really big change that many users have already spoken out about no more boom sound speakers instead of dual front-facing speakers we get a recessed fingerprint reader that can also be used as a home button and it sits alone below the display the back has the HTC logo and its new camera package is dead center at the top you know I can't really help but think that I've seen this design before I got it the HTC Desire eye and the desire 816 before it they both have the symmetry and the rounded sides and corners only this time around they've just decided to put metal on it just kidding but not entirely you see even though this phone obviously has some inspirations that people have been voicing their opinions out on HTC would be pretty quick to remind you that they were first in creating a number of metal devices and this time around you have AM unibody design that unfortunately kind of has the shape of not only the iPhone success but it actually has the shape of a couple of their mid-range offerings also and I think a lot of people forget that no that's not really enough to reconcile what is happening in the design of the HTC One a9 but there are some people out there who have been waiting for what they thought was Apple's good design language to actually hit the world of Android and that's exactly what we have here if you hate the design of this phone because of where you think it got its inspiration from then you're not going to get this phone but for everybody else here it is and by keeping the screen at five inches HTC keeps the one a9 in a pretty good place when it comes to handling full HD 1080p resolution is what you're getting here which means that this display for the most part is a decent performer colors do benefit from the black levels and the higher contrast so things look a little bit more saturated but when you get to extreme angles you do see a washout over everything on the screen and in bright daylight you might have to pump up the brightness a little bit just so you can see what you're looking at still we have to give the display some marks because it is one of the better handling ones available but it has a lot to do with the design as well as the smaller size of the display and in general usage for media and play we did find that the display was a pretty good performer but definitely doesn't blow away plenty of the other ones out there performance takes on a pretty similar outlook as we look at a lower tier package inside of the a9 now the snapdragon 617 might have come out fairly recently but it's definitely not as fast as its 800 to your counterparts three gigabytes of RAM is available in the 32 gigabyte version of this phone and it helps with loading the applications together sometimes all at once but the slower speed of the 617 is what is hard to overlook abs take a noticeable bit of time to load up and when certain tasks are operating in the background like GPS navigation the lag actually gets worse still for typical daily tasks it hasn't been unbearably slow just definitely not giving us the high powered performance of other phones that we've gotten our hands on as of late ultimately the display and performance aspects have been closer to mid-range than full on flagship which is fine but the changes in the hardware hope to bring more to talk about and we start off with the new fingerprint reader a front mounted unit underneath the display and it works pretty well even if it feels a bit tacked on as far as speed goes it has to go to the lock screen first and then as you hold usually your thumb on that particular area then it will go through the unlocking animation this does add a little bit of extra time when compared to other fingerprint readers out there but it's not so bad this is the thing about the fingerprint reader though it actually throws a wrench in a lot of what was supposed to be part of the HTC One line do you remember the sensor suite the motion gestures that you use in order to bring up the phone to your face and then once it knows that it's there you can tap on the screen or swipe in any number of directions in order to go to certain parts of the home screens well now that you have the fingerprint reader on here it's almost as if the motion gestures are made moot you don't even get to those particular areas of the home screens because you have to put your fingerprint down anyway so the narrative behind the HTC One m8 from before is kind of broken here in the a9 and then there's also the fact that you can use the fingerprint reader as a home button when you have this option on every now and then you might switch between using that or the soft key home button but the problem is if you use the hardware home button then there are no capacitive keys on its sides you still have to use the soft keys in order to navigate fiddling between the two was actually really common for us and of course there's the omission of the boom sound speakers due to this new feature one of the most recognizable parts of the HTC One devices thus no longer here and that's a pretty bold move sound thus gets a big downgrade now this bottom mounted speaker just doesn't get that loud and there's not a whole lot of body behind the sound anyway storage options some remain either 16 or 32 gigabytes with three gigabytes being put in the 32 gigabyte version but expandable storage in the a9 does give it an edge over plenty of the flagships that have omitted it this year and though my version of this phone is a European SKU and thus only connects to HSPA+ on 18 t for now it has been quite reliable in data in voice but in voice calls we did think that there needed to be a bump up in volume and finally in battery we have a very small 2150 million of our unit in here which comes with the obvious problems but HTC does hope to help that by including the Snapdragon 617 which can be updated to support quick charge 3.0 so obviously it's all about having a little bit of time in the middle of the day to just charge up the phone so we can get past the rest of the day but I would actually use the word survive that's because this small battery just wasn't able to really get through really heavy work days without needing to be plugged in in the middle of the day screen on time never really got over three hours for me in my somewhat more than moderate usage and unless you're doing less than moderate usage and taking advantage of doze by leaving the phone down for a while you're probably not going to get that much done throughout your day before having to plug in perhaps more so than ever the HTC One a9 shows that quick charge while great is definitely a consolation prize in comparison to actual great battery life and in camera a few past experimental phases bring what HTC hopes is the most effective combination of camera packages yet it starts off pretty well with the ultra pixel front facing shooter four megapixels is what you get here but it does a good robbed of flooding light in four good-looking selfies we have to commend HTC for sticking to their guns on ultrapixel but they also know what they're doing by putting it on the front for selfie cams the rear shooter is 13 megapixels @f 2.0 aperture but let's take a look at the app first it has the same Zoe powered gallery backing it and a number of different modes are available underneath including the new hyperlapse that was actually kind of fun to use but turns out pretty low resolution the pro mode brings manual controls as well as raw capture which do help in those situations where the auto mode just isn't cutting it and HDR though not auto capable adds a pretty good amount of punch and tends to even out to the shadows and the highlights but its effect is not really all that great in the colors as it doesn't necessarily punch it out as much as other competitors overall the camera is simply decent if you are still sour from the HTC One m9 though this might be the camera you were waiting for from HTC it isn't an incredible performer by any means but it falls in line with the kind of image processing that we've come to expect this year details get decently captured and colors get a bit of extra saturation in the brighter conditions but they do tend to taper off as the lower light comes into play quite a bit of noise reduction is still at work here but not so much that the details get incredibly smudged out now low-light performance does somewhat get helped by the optical image stabilization which also helps when you're trying to record video but there's a lot of noise that accompanies these pictures and the highlights tend to be blown out and unfortunately in those low-light situations much slower shutter speeds that are used to compensate for the low-light kind of make the OIS moot you have to be incredibly steady when you're trying to get that low-light shot it's kind of funny to think that we are impressed with this camera simply because we have the previous HTC one to compare it to but that also means that this camera is well decent but shows that HTC can be capable of moving up in the image Department in future devices and finally in software it's a pretty interesting development as the HTC One a9 will come with marshmallow out of the box this was due to some close work with Google this time around not only is marshmallow at the helm but sense is starting to strip down in order to be as close to the stock Android experience as it can be and also to allow for even more frequent updates but those are pretty miniscule by comparison because since still feels really prevalent in the skin after all blinkfeed is still here which we actually aren't really complaining about and replaces what would otherwise be Google now in the Google launcher and the app drawer while a vertical scroll liked it how this has been in since it's still paginated and doesn't include the line of the most used applications at the top now this is one of the features that we are a little perplexed didn't make it in with sense trying to be a stock light as it can possibly be apparently but all of the major marshmallow futures are included like doze and app permissions are found in the settings and will chime in when key portions of the phone are accessed by applications for the first time and Google now on tap brings its on demand searching service as well ultimately of course we are happy that marshmallow is available out of the box and if the little things that since no longer has allows it to be even more easily updated in the future as they claim then we're all for it it's an interesting metaphor for the rest of the device HTC is trying to adopt what it knows is well liked by the majority of users while trying to maintain its identity in whatever way possible but before we get a little too meta there let's look at the price though 399 was the original price that we showed in the first look HTC was becoming quite clear that this is a limited promotional price soon after the price of the phone will go up to 499 dollars and this has left us a little bit conflicted and that's because at a lower price I actually think that this phone would have made some waves there's really only one way of describing this device experimental everyone goes through an experimental phase and I really think that the HTC One a9 is kind of it let's say HTC went back to the drawing board and start messing around with what it thought were the features that the masses wanted and that we're missing from there let's say lackluster HTC One m9 for the display AMOLED may have seemed like the obvious choice in the hopes of future proofing the phone the Snapdragon 617 will support quick charge 3.0 but the battery is still the bare minimum ultra pixel has been made a front facing camera so HTC is still able to say that they are using it but the rear camera is more conventional yet it does provide results that are actually pretty decent and even if the fingerprint reader is in line with new hardware expectations it actually totally throws a wrench into the general narrative that HTC tried to form over the last couple of years now see this is a phone that actually gets the singular parts right but doesn't find a way of actually putting them all together in a really coherent way and that might be its biggest weakness but also its most interesting trait after all I keep using this phone and I kind of them smiling when I'm using it because not only is there some sort of craziness behind putting all these parts together they actually kind of work kind of well and for the daily user this is a pretty good device to have for the common daily tasks HTC is definitely trying here and their price will be a big stumbling point but if the company really puts its best foot forward we might see some great things from the next one flagship and that is because the one a9 has the breeding ground for all the features and quality that may have been missing in the past what I recommend this to everyone know now when we have a lot of great flagships already out at even better prices but HTC loyalists can have a good time with this experimental device that addresses a number of issues that they may have felt where in the one m9 and the best that we can hope for is that the experimentation proves pretty fruitful and we can really hope for greater things from HTC in the future as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the HTC One a9 it's not a bad device but it's also not a very overachieving device but what it does do is it addresses some of the issues that we have with the original HTC One m9 and I think that's very worthy of being mentioned nonetheless though with a slightly higher price point especially weeks after the original release then it kind of makes this phone a little bit harder to recommend but you can stay tuned to Android authority for even more about this phone and even more from my colleagues in Android like you can see over on the side don't forget to jump up to the corner there so you can get the Android authority app which is your gateway to all of our content from our videos to our articles to our podcast discussing topics in Android every 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