HTC One A9 review - The first non-Nexus phone with Android 6.0

Overview

The HTC One A9 looks and feels promising for a mid-tier smartphone - that’s because it rides on the reputation built around the flagship HTC One M series, such as the popular One M7, which helped defined Android smartphones back in its time, and the subsequent One M8, which was then followed by the 2015 flagship, the One M9. Like its flagship counterparts, the One A9 comes with HTC One’s “all-metal” physical design. It also sports a 13-megapixel rear camera and a front camera that features HTC’s proprietary UltraPixel sensor. It's also one of the first smartphones to feature a new mid-range processor – the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617. Despite its promising outlook, the initial public reaction the phone has been quite mixed, given how its appearance is similar to the iPhones from Apple.

Design & Handling

Physically speaking, the HTC One A9 is quite blatant in adopting the iPhone 6 design language. The rounded corners, the flat metallic rear cover with edges curving, and that fingerprint sensor at the bottom bunk of the HTC One A9 are some of the elements that resemble the Apple device. It isn’t a bad decision given that the iPhone is aesthetically well-designed, but deviation from their original award-winning design language felt redundant – just take a look at the HTC One M7 and you’ll understand what we mean. We’ll leave the design comparison as it is, since visual appeal is subjective and a smartphone’s merits don’t solely rely on its outward appearance.

First off, we’re glad that HTC decided to keep the full-metal rear chassis. Adding to its use of premium materials that have a high quality feel, HTC also adopts a ‘metalmorphics’ approach to evoke a natural look and feel to the phone’s finish. Combining its thin 7.26mm profile, all these give the phone a stylish look contrasted by its lightweight feel in hand. Moving to the front, you will see an edge-to-edge, 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 4 layered above the AMOLED screen that rounds off at the edges of the phone, blending both the seams in the metal and glass sides into one continuous flow.

The One A9's 5-inch size makes it a very comfortable fit in hand, since you get a display large enough for small on-screen text, yet a phone that's small enough to fit in one hand. And it doesn't feel as slippery as the iPhones. With the phone facing you, the HTC One A9 has its buttons along the right, with the ridged, tactile power button located where your thumb would rest, coupled with a pair of smooth volume buttons sitting above. This is similar to the HTC One M9’s button orientation. Wielding the HTC One A9 feels like holding a good knife - powerful, sleek, yet light.

Display & Audio

The HTC One A9 has a 5-inch, Full HD (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) resolution, giving it a pixel density of 441ppi. This is the same pixel density as the flagship One M9. The display has a warm color temperature profile, which feels easy on the eyes even at higher screen brightness settings. It also has a vibrant quality to it, giving great contrast between colors of different hues. One caveat would be how the screen doesn’t discern colors of similar tone with precise clarity. In our test image, you can see that the blue-white balloon in the top left quadrant was wonderfully reproduced on screen, but the main balloon with the strip of yellow didn’t have the same detail in between each ridge. At the lower left of the image, the blend of water, grass, and reflections became an uninteresting patch of darker colors hidden away. It’s a great and comfortable screen, but it’s certainly darker than what we are used to. Text displayed on the phone via text-based apps like social media and browsers are clear and sharp though, making the phone viable for reading.

HTC claims that the One A9 comes with its HTC BoomSound with Dolby Audio surround technology, but we find that the audio quality of the smartphone’s speakers isn’t anything to shout about. The maximum volume is sufficiently loud, and it audio reproduction is satisfactory - it has good separation between different frequencies with the exception of the lower range of frequencies. Audio sounds better on the One A9 when it’s against other mid-range smartphones, but you’d notice that the One A9 doesn’t come with the awesome front-facing speakers that were a staple for their flagship models, and that takes away some of the awesomeness that could have been the One A9’s. And lest we forgot, the phone has a built-in DAC capable of converting 16-bit audio to 24-bit high-resolution audio.

UI & Features

An interesting highlight of the HTC One A9 is that the phone comes with Android 6.0 OS Marshmallow out of the box. The One A9 is one of the few phones to do so (after the Huawei Nexus 6P and LG Nexus 5X). That’s taking into account new smartphones such as the LG V10 and Lenovo Vibe S1 that are coming, or are already in Singapore. While it’s not a massive perk, having the latest and greatest Android operating system out-of-the-box can mean that there’s no extended wait for compatibility updates, and it’s especially true if you are particular about using up-to-date software. Just look at all the expensive 2015 flagships from other brands - how many of them are running Marshmallow?

Marshmallow fever aside, the HTC One A9 comes with HTC Sense 7 out of the box - that’s the same HTC interface version when you get a flagship HTC One M9. We choose to look at it as a good thing where HTC gives the user all the goodies that made the flagship smartphones worth their weight in gold. The HTC One A9 comes with the same Sense Home display, BlinkFeed screen for social media, and HTC Themes for skinning your phone with - you could read them again in our HTC One M9 review here.

While technically a physical design, we consider the specially created physical Fingerprint Sensor at the bottom of the One A9 a feature in its own right. Functionality-wise, it’s more of a panel that’s touch-sensitive, instead of the clickable iPhone home button as we know about. The sensor also doubles as a screen wake-up button and a shortcut to the home screen when you’re in an app, making it extremely handy to have. We got used to the sensor very quickly because of how convenient it is. The fingerprint reading is quite accurate and fast to respond, so the feature does work as intended.

Benchmark Performance

Right from the get-go, you’ll notice that the HTC One A9 features an octa-core Snapdragon 617 - that’s a new Qualcomm processor that was announced in the second half of 2015, and it succeeds the octa-core Snapdragon 615 processor. The Snapdragon 617’s CPU features the Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.5GHz, and the processor comes packed with Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 (although it’s crucial to note that the HTC says that the One A9 will only support Quick Charge 3.0 "in the coming months"). The inclusion of the 617 automatically pits the device against smartphones with the older Snapdragon 615 processors - namely: Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, Xiaomi Mi 4i, Lenovo Vibe Shot, and ASUS Zenfone Selfie.

We’d love to compare the HTC One A9 against a fellow smartphone that contains a Snapdragon 617 processor, but the chip is so new that there’s only one other phone with it as of writing - the LG G Vista 2 – and LG says that the phone is not officially available in Singapore. We are also putting the A9 against its 2015 flagship HTC One M9, just to give you an idea how the Snapdragon 617 processor would fare against the Snapdragon 810, a mid-2014 flagship octa-core processor.

Our HTC One A9 has 3GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. The RAM provided is on par with the ASUS ZenFone Selfie listed in this comparison. HTC said that the 16GB version (with 2GB RAM) would not be available in Singapore.

Quadrant

Quadrant is an Android benchmark that evaluates a device's CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performance.

While the score is impressive enough to beat even the flagship HTC One M9 on paper, the HTC One A9 doesn’t necessarily exhibit that level of fluidity in every process. The smartphone runs Android 6.0 OS (Marshmallow) smoothly in normal usage, but the initial setup (from a clean slate) and opening a fresh app felt quite sluggish - which wasn’t the case for the other Snapdragon 615 smartphones listed here.

3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited

Originally developed as a PC benchmarking tool, 3DMark is now expanded to support multiple platforms including Android OS. The Ice Storm benchmark is designed for smartphones, mobile devices, and ARM architecture computers.

For an in-depth understanding of 3DMark for Android, do head over to our article, "3DMark - Android Device GPU Performance Review." In a nutshell, it is an OpenGL ES 2.0 benchmark test that uses fixed off-screen rendering to run two graphics tests designed to stress the GPU performance of your device and a physics test to stress its CPU performance. The benchmark consists of three test portfolios:- Standard (720p resolution rendering), Extreme (1080p resolution rendering with higher quality textures and post-processing effects) and Unlimited (disabled v-sync, display scaling and other OS factors that make it ideal for chipset comparison).

Unlike the Quadrant benchmark, the 3DMark graphics benchmark seems much more realistic, with the HTC One A9’s rating sitting just slightly above the other Snapdragon 615 processor smartphones. Flagship devices like the HTC One M9 leave the mid-range smartphone in the dust. Despite its benchmark scores, the HTC One A9 was excellent for games; we didn't run into serious crashing or throttling problems.

SunSpider

SunSpider JavaScript measures the browsing performance of a device. It not only takes into consideration the underlying hardware performance, but also assesses how optimized a particular platform is at delivering a high-speed web browsing experience.

Bearing in mind that the Snapdragon 617 is newer than the 615, the result for HTC One A9 isn’t that surprising. Actual usage of the smartphone for web-surfing proved to be good – in the sense that nothing was amiss with buttery smooth animation, sufficiently fast loading times, and no noticeable processing struggle from the browser itself. While it’s decent for a mid-range smartphone, the performance won’t be outperforming flagship phones. Be it by benchmark or actual use, the One A9 performs well in this aspect.

Camera Performance

The front camera on the One A9 uses the proprietary UltraPixel camera, while the rear camera has 13 megapixels and an f/2.0 aperture lens that comes with a sapphire cover. There's optical image stabilization for boosting low-light performance, too.

Despite its mid-range tier, the HTC One A9 doesn’t shortchange us when it comes to camera features. Beyond your typical Selfie, Panorama, and Default capturing options, the phone also has a manual mode called Pro, and the same mode also enables RAW capture. The Pro mode feels complete too - it allows you to do on-the-fly adjustment to white balance, exposure, ISO range, shutter speed, and subject focus. Hyperlapse is a fun video recording feature that maximizes its OIS, and you can control the speed of your slow (or fast) motion videos easily. The HTC One A9 can do recordings at 1080p, too.

The photos taken appear fine when viewed through the smartphone. Colors seem to be accurate, albeit a little washed out. Upon closer inspection, it shows how the camera lacks attention to detail - the lines on the rolls of threads simply blend into a single tone, and the labels on bottles were barely legible. It’s all right as a camera, but it won’t be outperforming the ASUS ZenFone Selfie in terms of control and detail.

Battery Life

Our standard battery test for mobile phones includes the following parameters:

• Looping a 800 x 480-pixel video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email and Twitter

The HTC One A9 has a battery capacity of 2,150mAh, with support for Quick Charge 2.0, and compatibility with Quick Charge 3.0 charging at a later date. HTC also claims that the battery can give a 3G talk-time of up to 16 hours.

That said, the resulting 7 hour 20 minute battery life derived from our test showed that HTC hasn’t really addressed how power-hungry their phones can be. More affordable alternatives like the ASUS Zenfone Selfie with its massive 3,000mAh capacity simply makes it hard to justify the HTC’s price tag. Against the rest of the Snapdragon 615 smartphones listed here, the battery life sits somewhere in the middle of the chart. To us, it feels like there’s no real battery advantage, should we pick the phone for its newer hardware. For reference, the flagship HTC One M9 and its predecessor didn’t fare well for battery life either, so this certainly isn’t a one-off issue with a product in this series.

Conclusion

Looking at the HTC One A9 as it is, the smartphone is a good enough mid-tier device. Due diligence was paid to ensure that it has good performance, despite only minor gains over other mid-range smartphones with older hardware. Its greatest flaw is still the mediocre battery life, but the same can be said for other mid-range phones with similar battery capacity sizes.

However, if you take smartphones like ASUS Zenfone Selfie and Sony Xperia M4 Aqua into consideration, it’s clear that the HTC One A9 - with an asking price of S$798 (32GB version) will find itself in an uncomfortable spot with said peers that are going for S$400 to S$500. Sure, getting the HTC One A9 will net you a newer mid-range processor which performs slightly better than the alternatives available and a very good build quality, but the significant difference in asking prices (60% more than Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, twice of ASUS Zenfone Selfie, or 186% more expensive than the Xiaomi Mi 4i) does not justify the money paid for the device as it currently stands, even when taking the phone’s good performance and full-metal chassis into account. Yes, the flagship HTC One M9 was worth the thousand-dollar price tag based on its merits, but we can’t bring ourselves to say the same for its latest mid-tier offering. In short, it’s a good enough phone priced wrong.

The HTC One A9 will be available in Carbon Gray and Topaz Gold color options. You can get it from local telecommunication operators SingTel, M1, and StarHub, as well as major consumer electronics stores and authorized retailers.

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