As an aspiring naval cadet in my senior year of high school, I was placed in charge of my ROTC unit’s drill team. It was a well-regarded outfit, but it had used the same choreography for years; no matter how cool a 12-person team looks spinning 16-pound rifles, anything gets monotonous if you don’t change it up. Seeking to leave a lasting legacy while bringing home a trophy or two, I told our unit’s Chief of my plans to completely overhaul our stale performance routine.
“Fisher,” he said, his face wrinkling with impatience, “you’ve got a good routine already. Don’t go reinventing the wheel.”
In other words: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Don’t change a winning team. Stick to the plan, man. Leave well enough alone. Don’t rock the boat.
With the new One M9, HTC takes a page right out of my old Chief’s playbook. The company’s 2015 flagship bears a look and feel right out of 2014 –and for that matter, 2013 as well– building incrementally on a solid design that, to be fair, has won the company plenty of awards. Iterative improvements are certainly nothing new in the smartphone space, but in a period of startling reinvention from the competition, was “sticking with what works” the right move? The answer below, in our HTC One M9 review.
There’s something to be said for sticking to your roots, assuming you’re starting from a good place to begin with. In our pre-review briefings with HTC, the company defended its iterative approach to the One family by invoking the legacy of the Porsche 911, a classic car which has evolved exceptionally slowly over the course of its 50-year history. HTC said it wanted to leverage its mastery of materials to “build an icon” with the One M9, retaining the advantages of its predecessors while ferreting out the shortcomings.
The company has largely succeeded in this goal, albeit in the most conservative manner possible. Like its forerunner, the One M9 bears an IPX3-certified rain-resistant aluminum chassis, and here the metal is double anodized as part of a 70-step process that takes twice the manufacturing time of 2013’s One M7(300 production minutes vs 150). The result is a familiar brushed finish on the back cover but a more chromelike gloss on the sides – sides which shine a ruddy gold on our silver review unit. HTC says the added gold is partly an effort to make the One line less overtly masculine. If it’s not your speed, other colors are available including the old standby, gunmetal gray.
Like most metallic phones, the One M9 is often cool to the touch and its 157g mass feels reassuringly rigid in the hand. It also feels more likely to stay in your hand than its slippery predecessor, thanks to a refined anti-scratch coating that offers substantially more grip than the One M8’s Teflon-esque finish. That simple change would have been enough for us, but HTC also replaced the One M8’s wraparound curves with pronounced, sharp edges to further improve handling. The result is a phone that’s better-looking perhaps, but also less comfortable to hold. Similarly, the move from a top-mounted power/standby key to a side button is a welcome change, but the decision to bunch it together with the newly-separated volume keys and MicroSD slot isn’t. Despite the texturing HTC put in place to differentiate the buttons, we’re constantly making the mistake of trying to unlock the M9 with the volume keys, or inadvertently putting the screen to sleep while trying to adjust the volume.
More is comming soon..
No comments:
Post a Comment