HTC One A9 review

A decent Android Marshmallow-powered smartphone doomed to fail by its price

HTC has ostensibly looked to take a mid-range route to recovery as it faces a shrinking smartphone business. The One A9 has thus been pitched as a relative of the One M9, being weaker but cheaper than the top-end handset was at launch.

That said, 'cheaper' is not the same as 'cheap', as the One A9 will launch with an RRP of £429.99, just £50 less than the Samsung Galaxy S6. We spent a few days with the One A9 to see whether this hefty price tag is justified.

Design
The One A9's aesthetic similarities to the iPhone 6S are well documented, but familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt. This is still a classy looking handset with a strong, bend-resistant aluminium unibody and curved edges that make it a pleasure to hold.

Measuring 146x71x7.3mm and weighing 143g, the One A9 is also almost identically proportioned to the iPhone 6S. Again, this is no bad thing as HTC's effort is still wonderfully slim and light. Even so, it manages to squeeze in a microSD card slot as well as the standard microUSB port. It's hardly a wealth of connectivity options, but expandable storage is one thing the One A9 has over Apple's and Samsung's handsets.

Another boost for the One A9's premium credentials is the front-mounted fingerprint sensor. It's blazingly fast and, despite being quite small and thin, rarely requires more than one scan attempt per unlock. Also, while it didn't seem to work in our initial hands-on with the One A9, the sensor does indeed function as a secondary Home button, in addition to the digital Home, Back and Overview buttons that appear on-screen. Although it would have been even better if all three were physical, rather than infringing on screen space.

It may be lacking in originality, but the One A9 still boasts some top-notch design features. If we had to nit pick, we found that it can get toasty if used while charging, but that's a fairly common problem with smartphones.

Display
The One A9 packs a 5in display at 1920x1080, or 441ppi. It's far from the largest screen around, but makes up for that with great sharpness and bright colours. 441ppi is pretty close to the 500+ppi offered by the best smartphones and phablets, and it can be difficult to perceive differences at such high densities anyway.

Other than some slightly dull whites, colour balance is spot on. Some displays that use the same AMOLED pixel-charging tech can create overly brilliant hues, but they appear vivid on the One A9 without looking sickly.

The Gorilla Glass 4 screen can prove reflective in most lighting, and indoor lighting gets particularly bothersome, but it does at least seem moderately resistant to fingerprints. We compared it with a Samsung Galaxy A5, and our thumbprints transferred much more fully onto the Galaxy A5's screen than they did onto the One A9's.

Next: Operating system, software and security

HTC One A9 review

A decent Android Marshmallow-powered smartphone doomed to fail by its price

Operating system and software
HTC can claim this to be the first non-Nexus smartphone with Android 6.0 Marshmallow pre-installed. That's a seriously attractive feature, as even top-end handsets are still awaiting an update to Marshmallow, while the chances of mid-range phones seeing the latest OS anytime soon look slim.

Reviewing the One A9 also gave us our first in-depth look at Marshmallow in action, and we're already won over. The new apps permission model is excellent, allowing users to extensively customise precisely what data an app can access even after it's been installed, while even small additions like the ability to search the apps drawer are genuinely useful.

We're also quite fond, albeit less enthusiastically, about Google Now on Tap. Holding the Home button in certain apps brings up additional info on whatever is being viewed. For example, we could activate Now on Tap while listening to a song in the Play Music app, and open a handy link to the music video on YouTube. It's lacking in enterprise-specific applications, and is really compatible only with Google's own software, but it's a clever feature nonetheless.

Still, even this brand new OS hasn't escaped the HTC Sense custom skin. Besides adding weird touches like keyboard keys that get smaller the further they are from the centre, HTC Sense is disappointingly bloat-happy. The BlinkFeed news feed is as superfluous as Flipboard, its Samsung counterpart, and there are no compelling reasons to use things like HTC Club or the suggested apps widget, which mainly promote even more HTC software.

In the One A9's defence, HTC Sense isn't without its perks. The Home widget allowed us to create custom home screen configurations depending on whether we were at work, at home or outside. For example, we could have Microsoft Word and Gmail shortcuts on the home page while we were at the office, and automatically replace them with YouTube and Twitter once we connected to our home WiFi network. It's an ideal tool for anyone who uses the same handset for work and personal purposes.

Security
The One A9 has a very decent collection of security features for a consumer-oriented device. We've already covered the fingerprint sensor, but it's worth reiterating how convenient this is for businesses with a shared pool of handsets. Each One A9 can be enrolled with up to five fingerprints, providing efficient, instant authentication for up to five users at once. In some ways, it's also safer than distributing a shared password, as there'll be no email or paper record of the password to steal.

Other than that, most of the One A9's security tools are built into Android 6.0 Marshmallow. This takes the full disk encryption feature of previous Android versions and makes it mandatory, adding a thief-thwarting passcode requirement to be entered every time the One A9 is switched on. Setting a Pin-based SIM card lock is also an option.

Next: Performance, cameras, battery, storage and conclusions

HTC One A9 review

A decent Android Marshmallow-powered smartphone doomed to fail by its price

Performance
It's been so far, so good for the One A9, which is why it's such a shame that it performed poorly in our benchmark tests.

In Sunspider and Kraken, where lower scores are better, it scored 1,695.4ms and 25,031.0ms respectively, even worse than the entry-level Motorola Moto E. It fared only slightly better in our other tests, where higher scores are better: 28,240 in Antutu, 620 single-core and 1,874 multi-core in Geekbench and 8,775 in 3DMark. Strangely, Basemark OS II invariably crashed just before returning any results.

Out of all the smartphones we've tested previously, these scores are most closely comparable with the 2015 Motorola Moto G, which costs less than half as much as the One A9. That's pretty dire, as well as confusing, since the internal hardware sounds alright: a Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 octa-core processor with four 1.5GHz cores and four 1.2GHz cores, alongside 2GB of RAM.

To be fair, HTC's handset coped competently with most everyday tasks. Web browsing, editing text documents in Word and searching through Google Maps are all perfectly doable, and we could even play a few 3D games at passable frame rates. The main difference between this and more powerful smartphones seems to be longer loading times for games and apps in general. We also found that menus could briefly become unresponsive if we flicked back and forth between them too quickly.

Cameras
The 13MP rear camera and 4MP Ultrapixel front camera both seem to have a nasty weakness: suboptimal light. They can capture detailed shots and colourful 1080p video, but they're prone to picking up large amounts of glare, and shadows can sometimes appear much darker than they are in real life. It can take up to a couple of seconds for the sensors to adjust to changes in light conditions, too.

Taken with the HTC One A9

In fact, our first attempt at creating a 'hyperlapse' video, basically just a timelapse, failed because of this. We started recording outside then headed indoors, but the rear camera didn't compensate for the changes in light at all, leaving all indoor footage hideously dark.

The One A9 does win back some points, though. The rear camera's shutter speed is impressively high, and the new camera UI, simplified from previous iterations of HTC Sense, is highly functional and user friendly. The One A9 is also one of very few smartphones that can take and process photos in RAW format.

Battery and storage
HTC claims that the One A9's integrated battery can provide up to 12 hours of video feedback. However, it fell well short of this in our tests, averaging eight hours and nine minutes when playing a looped, full-screen video from full charge to empty. On the bright side, that's about average for a smartphone, so at least lofty marketing claims aren't hiding some seriously lacking hardware.

What is lacking is internal storage. A thoroughly basic 16GB drive is included, of which only 9.76GB is free after a fresh installation. That's a frankly pitiful amount for £429.99, and is made bearable only by the all-too-crucial inclusion of microSD support.

Overall
We regard the One A9 with a certain sadness. It's a good smartphone in many respects, particularly in its design and choice of Android 6.0 Marshmallow as an OS, but the hefty price tag is a huge barrier to success.

Most inexplicably, it defeats the entire point. The One A9 is supposed to be a stripped-down but more affordable alternative to the One M9, but the One M9 has dropped well below £300 at a number of reputable retailers, so why not just get that instead?