HTC One S9
HTC went out and threw a curve ball by
launching a smartphone no one was expecting. A couple of weeks after we were
treated to the proper flagship HTC 10, we now have the One S9.
A unit less than the current top-end
number, the new smartphone also gets to keep the One moniker, joining the One
M9, A9, E9, X9, with a plus here and there and a Supreme Camera on top.
As a member of the previous generation
it also has similar styling to the M9 - the bold chamfer on the 10's back is
nowhere to be found. In fact, it's very much impossible to tell the S9 apart
from the M9 by looking at two devices' backs. It's on the front where changes
have been made, most notably the speaker meshes have been replaced by slits.
The display, on the other hand, is the same
5-inch FullHD Super LCD unit, with unspecified Gorilla Glass layer on top.
Inside, there's a Mediatek Helio X10 powering things, its 2 GHZ octa-core
Cortex-A53 CPU paired with 2 GB or RAM.
Internal storage is rather scant at
16 GB, 9.24 GB available to the user, HTC says. There is a microSD slot for
expansion, though, and even if the company keeps saying its phones support up
to 2TB, we're yet to see cards beyond 200 GB.
You get a 13 MP primary camera on the
back, not the One M9's 21 MP shooter. Looking at the specsheet, the f/2.0
aperture, 28 mm equivalent focal length, and OIS, it sounds a lot like the setup
of the One A9. The front-facing camera is the UltraPixel flavor, again straight
from the A9 - 4MP, 2 μm pixels, f/2.0 aperture, 26.8 mm equivalent focal length.
At 144.6 x 69.7 x 10.1 mm, the body of
the One S9 measures almost precisely the same as the M9, except for an increase
in thickness by half a millimeter. We're unsure who's the culprit, as battery
capacity is the same at 2,840 mAh. On the hardware front you're also getting
BoomSound speakers, and the proper kind too - stereo. What you'd be missing out
on though, is fingerprint recognition.
The HTC One S9 comes with a full host of
connectivity options including nine LTE bands with Cat.4 speeds, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac,
Bluetooth v4.1 and GPS/GLONASS/Beidou support. It launches with Android
Marshmallow on board, with the due HTC Sense enhancements.
It all sounds like a pretty great
midranger on paper, but we're not sure its price is doing it any favors. Listed
at € 499 in Germany, it may have a hard time competing with equally capable, but
substantially more affordable offerings. Barring carrier deals and potential
price cuts down the line, that is.
