Taiwanese smartphone vendor HTC simply can’t catch a break at the moment. Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for the company, it apparently has. HTC’s flagship smartphones, the One M9 and One M9+, are already suffering from poor sales worldwide, leading to the company’s stock price crashing to its lowest value in the company’s history. On top of that, reports now indicate that One M9+ sales have been halted in the Netherlands, amidst alleged concerns over 4G connectivity issues. The Phone House, a smartphone and accessories retailer in Europe, sent out a statement to its outlets asking all units to stop the sales of the One M9+ in the country with immediate effect “at the request of HTC”. HTC has released its own statement, which when translated from Dutch, reads, “HTC puts the quality of its products and providing an optimal user experience first. In that context, we are currently investigating the HTC One M9 +. This is the reason why we have to withdraw the device from the market temporarily. Once more is known, we will let you know. Thanks in advance for your understanding and patience”.
The One M9+ is a slightly larger version of the One M9, and features a 5.2-inch QHD (2560 x 1440) display rather than the 5-inch 1080p panel found on the smaller One M9. The device is also powered by a MediaTek chipset as opposed to the Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC found on the original One M9. Coming to the detailed hardware specs, the panel found on the One M9+ is a Super LCD3 capacitive touchscreen with a 565PPI pixel density. The smartphone is powered by a Mediatek MT6795T chipset, which comes with an embedded 64-bit octa-core CPU clocked at 2.2 GHz, and a PowerVR G6200 GPU. The device comes with 3 GB RAM and 32 GB ROM, and runs Android 5.0.2 Lollipop out the box with HTC’s Sense UI 7.0 laid on top. The smartphone packs a dual camera set-up at the rear, with a 20-megapixel primary camera aided by a 2.1-megapixel camera, ostensibly to allow better depth perception. The front-facing camera meanwhile, comes with a 4-megapixel sensor. The phone carries a 2,840 mAh Li-Po battery and comes with LTE connectivity.