Earlier this week, HTC took the wraps off of their newest device, the HTC One A9. For the most part, this device is meant to be a cheap, but semi-flagship device for the Taiwanese manufacturer. It’s priced at $399 unlocked here in the US, which puts it in some stiff competition with the likes of Motorola’s Moto X, ASUS’ Zenfone 2, Alcatel OneTouch’s Idol 3, the OnePlus 2, and a few others. Over in the UK, the One A9 is priced a bit steeper at £450 and it’s just gone up for pre-order.
Currently, Unlocked Mobiles has the HTC One A9 up for pre-order listing it at £450 and that includes VAT. They are offering it in the gray and silver models. Vodafone also has it up for pre-order, with it starting at £35 per month with a £9 fee for 1GB of data, or £45 if you want more data. The HTC One A9 features a 5-inch 1080p display. Powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 617 processor (which means it does indeed support Quick Charge 3.0) and it also has 2GB of RAM along with 16GB of storage inside. Fortunately, HTC did include a microSD card slot for the One A9. It’s also the first non-Nexus to launch with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and it’ll be available in the beginning of November.
Speaking of Marshmallow, HTC is promising that new Android OS updates for the One A9 will be made available within 15 days of when Google pushes it to the Nexus devices. Which is a pretty fast turnaround. Part of how they are doing this is taking out a bit of integration with Sense. Sense is their custom UI, which isn’t as integrated into the Android OS as it used to be. Which means they can throw out updates even quicker than before.
The HTC One A9 may not be the best looking smartphone out there, but it is a great overall package. Including the fingerprint sensor on the front. And with Marshmallow support for fingerprint sensors, it’s definitely a great thing to have on the device. We’ll have to see if they can hold up to that 15 days for new Android OS updates. They had trouble with their 90 day promises in the past.