HTC’s biggest launch of the year, the HTC One M9 Plus, is available in India through the grey market at Rs 46,000. while the the phone will be officially available at around the Rs 42,000 mark by a couple of weeks.
The phone is available with certain dealers in the Delhi market.
UPDATE: The phone has been launched officially at a price of Rs 52,000.
The current sale of the phone is without company warranty, and a Delhi-based distributor said official prices will be announced soon, and customers should wait for it.
According to him, all four phones — M9+, M9, E9+ and E9, will be launched by the end of this month. He said the 5.2-inch M9 and the 5.5-inch E9 Plus are likely to be priced at around the same level – Rs 35,000-36,000, while the E9, the cheapest of the four, will be priced around the Rs 27,000 mark.
The key difference between the M series and the E will be size and power.
The M Series are likely to be about 20% more powerful than the E Series, even though both are 64-bit. In addition, the M Series has 3 GB of RAM, while the E Series comes with 2 GB.
In terms of size, the E Series will have 5.5-inch screens and and M Series has the 5.2 inch displays.
Within each series, the ‘Plus’ version with have quad-HD displays, while the normal version will make do with full-HD screens.
The most high end of these phones will be the M9 Plus, coming as it does with both a Quad-HD display, a Snapdragon 810 processor and 3 GB of RAM.
The Snapdragon processor has four high-power Cortex A57 cores and four low-power Cortex A53, while the MediaTek variant has eight Cortex A53 cores inside it.
PRICE COMPETITION
HTC has been fairly aggressive with its pricing of the Desire series, and it could even price the phone at Rs 40,000 to take market, said the distributor. However, since the One series is its flagship, he added, chances of such a move are less.
Interestingly, M9+ will have its task cut out in India, where it will take on the Sony Xperia Z3, (price Rs 35,000), the Moto Turbo (price Rs 42,000), the Google Nexus 6 (Rs 44,000) and the Galaxy S6 (50,000).
Against the super AMOLED technology used by all these models, the HTC model alone comes with super LCD display technology.
According to Wikipedia, both types of displays have their own utility, with AMOLED promising more vibrant colors and Super LCD offering higher clarity.
“While AMOLED technology generally displays darker blacks and saturated colours making videos and images appear clearer and more vibrant, SLCD technology avoids the need for pentile subpixel formations (which use a larger shared blue subpixel to avoid fading over time) and thus creates sharper detail making text and videos appear clearer.”
That said, we feel that the AMOLED models will hold the edge in display attractivenesses as clarity is not going to be a factor at QHD resolution.
The key differentiator for the HTC One M9+, vs Xperia Z3, Nexus 6 and Moto Turbo is the processor.
The M9 Plus comes with Snapdragon 810 – which is 64-bit hardware – paired with Android Lolipop 64-bit. In fact, the M9 series will be the only one which will come with Snapdragon 810.
All other competitors have 32-bit Snapdragon 805 chipset.
In terms of operating system, Galaxy S6, Nexus 6 and Moto Turbo have Lolipop, while Xperia comes with KitKat.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is in a class apart on this front, as it not only comes with a 64-bit processor, but also with world’s leading 14-nm FinFet technology.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is about 25% faster than even the Snapdragon 810, and about 50% more powerful compared to the Snapdragon 805 platform underlying the Nexus 6, Xperia Z3 and Moto Turbo.
In terms of storage, the HTC M9+ will have 32 GB of storage, similar to the Galaxy S6 and Nexus 6. The Xperia, which is priced at just Rs 35,000, has only 16 GB of storage. The outlier is the Moto Turbo, which has 64 GB of storage.
HTC ONE E SERIES
In addition to the M Series, HTC will also unveil its MediaTek based E Series phones. In terms of power, these are comparable to the Snapdragon 805-based phones listed above, with the added advantage that the E9 and E9 Plus are 64-bit architectures.
The E9 and E9+ also have 32 GB of storage. The only difference, besides the processor, is that they both come with 5.5-inch displays and not 5.2 inch, and have 2 GB of RAM and not 3 GB.
In other words, the only practical difference between the M9+ and the E9+ is a power difference of around 22%. But given that these are phones, and not computers, the performance offered by the MediaTek MT6795 will be practically identical for practical usage compared to that offered by Snapdragon 810. Apps may load about 100 milliseconds faster, but how many would be willing to shell out an extra Rs 6,000-7,000 for it?
Most other features are as expected – 21 MP cameras, Dolby Sound, fingerprint sensors etc..
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