HTC announces the One A9, a midrange phone with a serious iPhone vibe

HTC released the One M9 earlier this year to lukewarm reviews and lackluster sales. The company’s revenue has tanked and its greatest asset is now the cash it holds in reserve. That’s usually a very bad sign for a company, but HTC has a plan. In hopes of turning things around, HTC has announced a new device that isn’t part of the premium M line or the budget Desire series. The HTC One A9 is a midrange Android device with a very familiar look.

You won’t see a single article covering this phone that doesn’t address the obvious similarity to an iPhone 6, so let’s get that out of the way. Yep, it looks a lot like a iPhone. It has the same overall shape and rounded metal frame, and the plastic antenna strips are in roughly the same place too. On the front is a 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display and below it a fingerprint sensor. For years one of HTC’s hallmark features has been the front-facing Boomsound speakers, but now those are gone. Instead there’s just one speaker on the bottom, but HTC says the A9 has a built-in digital audio converter (DAC) that converts 16-bit audio to 24-bit high-resolution sound.

There were some bloggers and HTC fans who insisted in the run up to the A9’s announcement that this was going to be a flagship device, but looking at the internals, that’s definitely not the case. The Snapdragon 810 in the M9 was a mess because of poor heat management, but many OEMs address that by going with the Snapdragon 808. Not HTC — the midrange A9 is packing a Snapdragon 617.

The Snapdragon 617 is an octa-core ARM chip with eight Cortex-A53 CPUs, an Adreno 405 GPU, and integrated cat 7 LTE. The chip is a slightly newer version of the Snapdragon 615, which has powered numerous $200-250 phones over the last year. However, the HTC One A9 costs a lot more at $399 in the US (more internationally). Those A53 cores are basically the LITTLE half of the big.LITTLE in chips like the 810 and 808. The problem with Qualcomm’s latest 600 series chips is that they tend to consume too much power when active, unless they’re downclocked, in which case they’re too slow.

There are two versions of the A9 — one with 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM, and another with 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM. The 32/3GB version is the one that’s being sold in the US for $399. Both versions of the phone also have a rather small 2150mAh battery, which is non-removable.

The HTC One A9 will work on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, but there’s also an unlocked version. That’s what you ought to get when buying direct from HTC because it comes with an impressive update guarantee. HTC says the unlocked A9 will get new system updates no more than 15 days after Nexus phones. That would be great if HTC could pull it off, and the phone already ships with Marshmallow. It’s a new version of Sense, but it doesn’t look much different. That’s probably fine, though. Sense is great as far as OEM Android skins go.

According to HTC, the $399 price is a temporary deal. It will go up later, which seems like a bad idea to me. As it is, the A9 is already at a disadvantage compared with other phones in that price range like the Nexus 5X and 2015 Moto X Pure. If the price goes up, this phone is even less likely to save HTC.