HTC One A9 review: Flagship pricing, without the performance

Update: The HTC One A9 turned out the be the last in the line of HTC Ones, with the Taiwanese manufacturer’s latest handset dropping the ‘One’ and ‘M’. We raved about the HTC 10 in our review recently, and coming back to the HTC One A9 reveals exactly why the HTC 10 is so good.

While the A9 was – and is – style over substance, the HTC 10 offers performance and features up with the best of them. The price may have dropped since I wrote this review back in November, but people looking for a low-cost handset with similar performance are better off with the OnePlus 2, while those looking for a true flagship performance should be prepared to pay more.

The original review continues below.

When HTC announced its latest not-quite-a-flagship-but-priced-like-one handset, the HTC One A9, it turned a lot of heads. Unfortunately, while there was a lot of praise for the handset’s aesthetic, there was less for the Taiwanese manufacturer’s originality: the HTC One A9 will look very familiar indeed to Apple enthusiasts.

The shape, the lines, the curves. Put the A9 side-by-side with an iPhone 6s and it’s really just the camera placement and the company logos that give the game away. That’s a touch unfair, perhaps – smartphones can only be so different from each other, after all – but if you’re drawing comparisons with the most popular premium handset of its generation, you’d better be sure the comparison is flattering. Or, at least, not too embarrassing.

Early impressions are good. Being compared with the iPhone – even if it’s being accused of copycat tactics – is aesthetically a good place to be. The HTC A9 looks great, and feels wonderful in the hand. The large, slightly raised glass display looks expensive and sleek, and the curved edges complement the flat metal unibody design perfectly. It very much looks the part.

However, it does lose a mark against past HTC flagships in one key design area: it now has a physical button on the front, which rather spoils the sense of minimalism. There’s a very good reason for this, though. It’s the first HTC smartphone to have fingerprint security built in, and it mostly works very well, allowing you to unlock the screen with just a thumb press. It doesn’t always detect straight away, but it works consistently enough that it’s preferable to tapping out your passcode.

HTC One A9 review: Performance

The screen is also excellent. So far, HTC has stuck resolutely to a resolution of 1080p, which is absolutely fine for the handset’s 5in corner-to-corner size, providing a pixel density of 440ppi. It uses AMOLED technology and puts in a splendid effort, covering 100% of the sRGB spectrum, with images appearing sharp and vibrant. At its top brightness, it achieves a luminance of 347cd/m2, which isn’t the brightest around, but is a decent effort.

So far, so good. Where the phone begins to fall down, though, is in performance. In day-to-day usage, the handset appears as nippy and smooth as many other box-fresh Android smartphones, but there are warning signs that, despite its high price, the A9 is not going to offer performance on a par with its flagship rivals.

It’s the first phone we’ve seen with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 inside, and backed up with the handset’s 2GB of RAM, it manages respectable, if not stunning results. In Geekbench 3, it achieved a single-core score of 732 and a multi-core score of 3,050. In comparison, that puts it a little way behind the company’s eight month-old One M9 flagship (838 and 3,677) and more in the ballpark of the OnePlus One (972 and 3,018) and Huawei Honor 6 (864 and 3,095). It’s a long way behind its stylistic sibling, the iPhone 6s (2,523 and 4,396).

Things get worse in the gaming tests, where the HTC One A9 managed 6.9fps in the Manhattan test. This is intensive, to be fair, with the Samsung Galaxy S6 only managing 15fps, but it places the A9 alongside the likes of the Motorola Moto E2 (6.4fps) and Alcatel Idol 3 (6fps). That’s hardly the kind of company the A9 should be keeping, considering how expensive it is.

HTC One A9 review: Software

Unless you’re a serious gamer, you likely won’t suffer from the slightly weaker graphics chip the HTC One A9 has opted for. And the Android installation fronting the A9 (based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow) is extremely slick, providing nice graphical touches that haven’t yet been inherited by my aging HTC One M8. Icons glow subtly when touched, menus slide down with panache and icons leave a ghostly trail when they’re moved. This is all highly superficial, but these things make a difference when you’re paying a premium.

It also contains the latest version of BlinkFeed, HTC’s news/social feed to the left of the main homescreen. News from various sources, including your own social accounts, can be easily accessed from here, and – rather smartly – it will download content for offline reading, which is perfect when you spend more hours than you’d like on the tube.

The final aspect of note is a homescreen that adapts to where you are. The apps on the main screen are placed in a dark square with a dropdown menu at the top, providing Out, Home and Work options. Changing this subtly alters the shortcuts: Home, for example, suggests themes, Facebook, Twitter and News Republic, while switching to Work adds Mail, Drive and Calendar to the mix. It’s all completely customisable, of course, and is a neat feature, but one that I can’t see saving me more than a couple of seconds per day.

HTC One A9 review: Camera and battery life

Camera technology is one area that HTC is often criticised for, but to give the company credit, the A9 sees a significant improvement here. The main snapper – a 13-megapixel affair – provides photographs that are a definite step up from the previous HTC One models. If you zoom in on pictures, noise and over-processing creeps into the images, but casual photographers will be perfectly happy with the A9’s results, especially in low light conditions where many handsets fall down.

Speaking of areas where certain handsets fall down, the battery life of the HTC One A9 is pleasingly solid – just as well, given the sealed design means that the battery inside can’t be replaced.

In our video rundown test (with the screen set to 170cd/m2), it managed 10hrs 2mins. That’s a good 45 minutes longer than the M9, although still some way behind the incredible stamina offered by others under identical conditions.

The Xperia Z5 Compact managed 13hrs 21mins, while the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge achieved a whopping 15hrs 33mins before giving up the ghost. In daily use, the HTC One A9 would sometimes get through a day having barely broken the 50% barrier, so I’m pretty confident you could dodge the nightly charging cycle if you’re careful  – at least to begin with.

HTC One A9 review: Verdict

In short, the HTC One A9 is a decent mid-range phone at a price that nobody should consider. In the US, the A9 can be had for $399.99, with an additional 1GB of RAM and 16GB internal storage. That’s around £262, and a fair price for a stylish handset that doesn’t quite perform as well as the best.

In the UK, astonishingly, a weaker version of the handset somehow manages to retail for £167 more. Okay, the $400 price is a time-limited offer, and don’t forget that this doesn’t include US sales tax. The pricing in the UK is mad, especially when you can buy a Samsung Galaxy S6 for £395 or an LG G4 for £300. When the price cuts inevitably hit, the A9 might be worth considering. For now, though, there are far better options.