We’re days away from the reveal of the HTC One M9 in Barcelona, just before Mobile World Congress 2015. While we’ll have Dan on the ground to cover the reveals, it seems Upleaks has beaten everyone to the punch with an “Introduction” video for the phone.
The video – strangely, made for portrait orientation – seems to confirm a number of rumoured specs and features, while also revealing some new information about new Sense features and capabilities.
Design-wise, the video claims a “Refined two-tone metal finish” (they’re not wrong, it looks lovely even if it looks pretty similar to the M8), and looks very close to the Cyberport images spotted the other day. It claims an UltraPixel camera on the front for “better selfies in low light” with a 20MP rear camera to “capture every detail”. If that last part is true, then the Duo Camera is history.
Unsurprisingly, BoomSound is front and centre on the M9 but HTC’s brought Dolby Audio Surround on instead of the Beats Audio of yesteryear.
There’s a number of software features, too:
- Themes, letting you personalise your home screens. The video appears to show colours being extracted from selected wallpapers and applying the colours to your homescreens.
- Home Widget, displays different app shortcuts on your homescreen based on your location (this seems similar to Aviate).
- BlinkFeed makes a return, with the addition of meal time suggestions – these appear to be powered (at least in part) by Yelp (someone needs to tell HTC that 10am is not lunchtime, though).
- Photo Editor with “artistic ways to edit your photos”, which a quick demo of some alpha blending effects.
There’s also mention of HTC Connect, which allows you to stream video or music with a three-finger swipe upward on the screen. This is very similar to the way iOS apps invoke Apple’s AirPlay functionality.
Most interestingly (well, for those of us who are picky), there’s four soft buttons on the screen. Left to right, it seems to be Back, Home, Recent Apps and … Power??
All will be revealed in the wee hours of March 2 in Barcelona, and we’ll be covering it live. In the meantime though, if anyone has any idea why the video’s portrait-oriented, let us know.
Real deal or no deal? What do you think of the video — and, if it’s real, the HTC One M9? Tell us in the comments!
