One M9 is HTC’s most powerful phone yet

THIS phone will automatically organise your apps and take crisp selfies in low light.

HTC One M9

NEW cameras, great audio and a menu that arranges app icons based on their usage are features of HTC’s new premium smartphone — One M9.

HTC announced the new smartphone at a keynote event held ahead of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This week we spent a little hands-on time with the device.

Powered by a Snapdragon 810 8-core CPU, the unit is HTC’s most powerful flagship to date. It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and a slot for a microSD card for an additional 128GB. You might need that extra storage; in the review unit, about 14GB was taken up by the operating system and sample media.

Like previous flagships, the One M9 has a brushed aluminium seamless unibody. This model has a dual-tone finish.

There are some important changes from previous models. HTC has dropped having a lower resolution camera with larger pixels on the back. Instead, it offers a high-resolution 20-megapixel snapper on the rear.

The larger pixel concept persists with a front facing UltraPixel TM camera. HTC says the camera captures 300 per cent more light than its predecessor, and offers much better image definition in difficult lighting conditions.

HTC says its research shows a lot of selfies are taken at night. The phone’s camera is designed for this situation. The camera also shoots 4K video.

The new phone features Sense 7, HTC’s latest Android adaptation, which displays the most used apps automatically on the home screen. HTC’s Blinkfeed — a news feed that displays on the home screen — is back and HTC says you can fine tune it to show news feeds more akin to your tastes. Blinkfeed can be turned off if you don’t want it.

HTC has resisted the move by some competitors to adopt a qHD or 2K display. Instead it sticks with 1080p high-definition display, which means better battery life. The phone has a 2840 milliampere hour fixed battery.

Sense 7 also offers new editing features — you can add graphical shapes to shots and can create a shot using two layers of images. A new One Gallery acts as an aggregator of photos saved on the phone, on social media and stored with various cloud services.

HTC’s BoomSound is one of the features most promoted with this phone. Like its predecessors, the One M9 has dual front-facing speakers, and now simulates 5.1 channel Dolby cinema-style surround sound.

Accessories include an updated version of the HTC Dot View case, which displays the time and other lock screen information through a lattice of dots on the front cover. You can even play a game with the cover on.

The phone will be available globally in dual-tone silver and rose gold, single-tone gunmetal grey, single-tone gold and dual-tone gold and pink from mid-March. HTC has not released Australian pricing but says it will be around the price f the M8, which started at $899.

It will be released with the new Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system next month.

Chris Griffith travelled to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress courtesy of HTC.