It was nearly three weeks ago that HTC announced their new HTC One A9 smartphone. It was already on HTC’s Canadian site for pre-order in either Carbon Grey or Opal Silver for $549 plus an additional $10 for shipping. However, the promised delivery date of November 6 came and went without any devices ever being shipped. After a short, unannounced delay, the HTC One A9 is now listed as “In Stock on November 11” and shipping as is quietly indicated on the HTC Canadian site (see below). While this unlocked device should work on any Canadian network, HTC specifically lists “supported carriers: Bell, Rogers, Telus, Videotron and Wind Mobile.”
The HTC One A9 is a full-metal build with a great resemblance to the iPhone – which is not a bad thing, simply an observation. They removed the dual speakers in favor of a single speaker on the bottom and made room for a ‘Samsung-like’ home button on the front bottom that is actually the fingerprint sensor. The One A9 is manufactured in four great colors – Topaz Gold, Carbon Grey, Deep Garnet and Opal Silver – although in Canada it looks like the Carbon Grey and Opal Silver will be your only choices…at least for a while. HTC is hoping that this mid-range device will help pump up their sales as they seem to be concentrating more of the low-midrange markets, content to let Samsung, Apple and LG battle it out in the high-end segment.
The HTC One A9 sports a 5-inch FHD AMOLED display with a resolution of 1900 x 1080 pixels and 441 pixels-per-inch (PPI). It packs a 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 octa-core processor with four cores clocked at 1.2 GHz and four cores clocked at 1.5 GHz. The One A9 comes with two options – a 2GB/16GB and a 3GB/32GB – with the 3GB model coming to North America. Both variants offer a microSD card slot to expand the base memory up to 200GB. The main camera has 13MP with autofocus, a dual-tone flash and OIS. The front-facing camera (FFC) uses a 4MP UltraPixel sensor for selfies and video chatting. As mentioned earlier, is no BoomSound here – just a single speaker on the bottom of the device, although it does have a special Dolby Audio with Hi-Res Audio for great headphone listening. A non-removable 2,150 mAh battery with Quick Charge capabilities provides power to the HTC One A9.
It has the usual suspects – Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, an FM Radio, NFC and a microUSB v2.0 port for charging and data transfer. It measures 145.8 x 70.8 x 7.3 mm and weighs in at 143 grams and will be running Android 6.0 Marshmallow out-of-the-box.