Specs at a glance: HTC One A9 Screen 5-inch, 1080p AMOLED, Gorilla Glass 4 OS Android 6.0 Marshmallow CPU Snapdragon 617, 64-bit octa-core Cortex A53: 4 cores @ 1.5GHz; 4 cores @ 1.2GHz RAM 2GB (3GB in 32GB storage model) GPU Qualcomm Adreno 405 GPU Storage 16GB or 32GB, plus micro SD expansion Networking 802.11 Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 & 5 GHz) Ports Micro USB, headphone jack Camera 12MP rear camera, 4MP HTC ultrapixel selfie camera Size 145.75mm length, 70.8mm width, 7.26mm depth Weight 143g Battery 2150mAh Network Bands 2G: 850/900/1800/1900MHz, 3G: 850/900/AWS/1900/2100MHz, 4G (EMEA/Asia): FDD bands 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, TDD bands 38, 40, 41, 4G (USA): FDD bands 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 17, 29 Other perks Quick Charge 3.0 support, 24-bit DSP and DAC, RAW image support Price $399 direct from HTC.com (introductory period only; $500 thereafter) / £430

Oh, HTC: you got so very, very close with this one. In some ways, the HTC One A9 is an excellent mid-range phone. It sports a 5-inch screen, a size many—myself included—consider an ideal balance between screen size and practicality. It's plenty fast, if not outrageously so, thanks to its Snapdragon 617 SoC and 2GB (or 3GB if you're in the US) of memory, while its camera is capable of taking some great photos—it even has a micro SD card slot for cheap storage expansion. And yes, while there's no question that the A9's design is derivative of a certain fruit-based company's leading smartphone, it is still a gorgeous thing to look at. Like all phones in the HTC One lineup, it's well-built too.

But man, the battery life is a killer. After years of poor battery life on Android, I finally thought we were past the point of phones dying during your evening commute. There's also the small matter of price. In the US, at $399 for an unlocked edition of the phone—complete with 32GB of storage, 3GB of RAM, an unlocked bootloader, less pre-installed software, six-months of free Google Play Music, and 12-months of HTC's Uh Oh protection—the A9 and its classy, all-metal body is definitely worth a look, despite the poor battery life. However, at £430 ($660!) in the UK—that's more than the faster M9, and just £30 less than an iPhone 6—for a 16GB version with 2GB of memory and none of the extra goodies, it's unquestionably awful. Don't buy this phone if you live in the UK.

Design

The UK price is such a shame, because I do really like this thing. A lot of it is down to the design, and HTC's build quality. The A9 is as close as you're going to get to owning a phone with the looks of an iPhone—with similar colour choices, too: Carbon Grey and Deep Garnet (red) with black fascias, and Opal Silver (pictured) and Topaz Gold with white fascias—and the flexibility of Android. Side-by-side with Apple's phone, the resemblance is uncanny, and as I put it through its paces during testing, lots of people said they thought I was using an iPhone until they caught a glimpse of the HTC logo. It even feels the same when you use it, thanks its smooth curved corners, and glass that tapers in at the edges. It weighs exactly the same as an iPhone 6S at 143g.

HTC has long had some of the best-looking Android phones in the business, based on its own unique design language. And while it's sad to see some of that disappear in the A9—the Boomsound speakers, the curved back, and the big camera cut-outs—I'll admit that having an iPhone-like design with Android on it is appealing. The A9 is thin (7.2mm), and light, and immensely practical. The fingerprint sensor below the Gorilla Glass 4 screen is super-fast and accurate, and I like that it doubles up as a home button and a way to wake the screen up from sleep. I like the subtle speaker grille on the bottom of the phone, too, along with all the ports and buttons that feel like they've carved out of a solid block of aluminium.





































I like that HTC has finally given the power button a noticeably different texture to the volume rocker above it, even if it'd better if the rocker was on the opposite side of the phone. That's where the SIM card and micro SD card (up to 1TB) trays live. I even like the smaller, subtler camera module on the back, as iPhone-like as it is, and that it's centred rather than tucked away to the side. I really like the 5-inch AMOLED screen. It's super sharp thanks to a 1080p resolution (working out to 440 PPI), and it's vibrant and colourful without being over-saturated in the way that Samsung's Super AMOLED screens can be.

And I love the headphone amp and audio on this thing. While I'd suggest turning off the Dolby enhancements (it's a bit too artificial for my ears), the 24-bit DAC and DSP do a great job of turning those 1s and 0s into tunes, while the super-loud headphone amp is able to drive demanding cans and buds without needing to crank the volume, which often results in amplifier distortion. I wish more smartphone makers put as much effort into audio as HTC has with the A9; it really does make a difference.

If you're in the US, this sort of build quality at a $400 price point is rare. Plastic, rather than aluminium is usually the order of the day. If the A9 does nothing else but encourage smartphone makers to up their build-quality game at the mid-range, then it'll have served a fine purpose. If you're in the UK, well, the A9 is still a solid thing... it's just that you're paying a flagship price for a phone with less than flagship specs.

Software

Specs aren't everything, of course, and while I'll go into more detail about the A9's performance later, I will say that I never once lamented that there's only a mid-range SoC in this phone. Partly, it's probably down to what has to be the lightest version of HTC Sense yet. The company is making a rather big hoohah about having worked closely with Google to get Android 6.0 Marshmallow on the A9 at launch, and that relationship has paid dividends when it comes to getting rid of crap software that no one really needs. Gone are the HTC versions of gallery apps, and music apps, and all the other stuff that either Google bundles in with Android, or that users can grab a far superior version of from the Google Play Store.

There are other welcome tweaks, too, including the pull-down notifications shade, which is the stock Marshmallow one, and the fact that you can finally do a standard Google restore from another device, rather than be forced to use HTC's own proprietary software. And, in small but extremely welcome victory for me at least, you can finally add Exchange accounts to the Gmail and Google Calendar apps, instead of being forced to use HTC's own mail app, and all without going through some inane system-level tweaks. Quite why HTC (and indeed Sony and others) forced users to do this, I'll never know.









HTC Sense hasn't completely shed all its Android customisations, but what's left is completely liveable and/or removable. Blinkfeed and its social network news feed is still there for those that like it, along with the "smart home screen" that changes icons based on your location, but you can just as easily swap over to the stock Google Now launcher or any other launcher and be done with it. Same goes for the otherwise decent HTC keyboard. With those swapped out, really all you're left with is the HTC lock screen—which is pretty close to stock anyway—along with a few Sense remnants like the settings menu, which still sports HTC's thin and tall fonts and blue and grey colour scheme.

If you do opt to use the Google Now launcher, you even get your stock icons back (something that unfortunately doesn't happen with Huawei's Emotion UI, for instance). Those that stick with Sense can at least switch things up thanks to the theme store, which has proved oddly popular. HTC boasts that there have been 7.1 million downloads of themes and that it's seen some 5.5 million unique users. Whatever the stats, there are lots of themes on the store, most of which are free, and most are of a good quality. There are several "stock" themes, too, which replicate the stock Android look across several different versions.

That the latest version HTC Sense is so close to stock means that you essentially get a stock Android experience when you use it. The A9 is one of the first phones outside the Nexus range to get Android Marshmallow, which is something of an iterative improvement, rather than the drastic overhaul that Lollipop was. That's not to say it doesn't have some incredibly useful new features, though. For the full skinny on Marshmallow, I definitely recommend checking out Ron Amadeo's excellent review, but there was one Marshmallow feature that impressed me greatly: proper SD card support.

If you're unlucky enough to be lumped with the 16GB version of the A9, over 8GB of that is going to be taken up by the OS alone. That doesn't leave a whole lot for apps and media. Thanks to Marshmallow, you just stick a micro SD card in the phone, after which you can use it as permanent internal storage by integrating it with the existing storage drive. No longer must you tell the camera to store photos on the SD card, or manually move apps over (for those apps that could be moved over, anyway). It's exactly like having a phone with lots of internal storage, which is exactly how SD cards should have been handled by Android in the first place.