Spot quiz time. Which company made the first colour touchscreen smartphone? If you said Apple, guess again.
It was HTC, with its 3.5-inch screen O2 XDA in 2002, a full five years before the first iPhone arrived on the scene.
I owned several handsets with touchscreens in those pre-iPhone years, including another HTC, the TyTN II, a smartphone running Windows Mobile which also had a slide-out physical keyboard.
The Taiwanese multinational has a number of other firsts to its name, as company chairwoman and chief executive, Cher Wang, pointed out recently.
“HTC is a smartphone pioneer, having delivered the first Android smartphone, the first Windows smartphone, the first 4G smartphone, and the first all-metal smartphone,” she said.
All very interesting, but why the history lesson now? I hear you ask. I was wondering the same thing.
Wang was listing those firsts before announcing her company’s latest smartphone, the HTC One A9.
When I saw the device it all made sense. That’s because HTC can now add another achievement to that list – best iPhone clone.
The subtext of the history lesson was now clear: “Before you accuse us of copying Apple, please be aware that they copied all these other things from us.”
Still, it’s startling just how closely the A9 resembles the iPhone 6 – and its successor, the identical-looking 6S.
I suppose if you’re going to copy another handset, you could do worse than choose one of the best-looking phones around, and the A9 is doubtless a real stunner. It’s got a five-inch, full HD Amoled screen, putting it midway in size between the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Nevertheless, for fans who’ve become accustomed to the signature HTC design through successive generations One devices, the departure is jarring.
The superbly crafted aluminium body remains, but the trademark subtly curved back is gone and it’s now as flat as the iPhone’s.
Gone, too, are the stereo speakers on the front that made previous versions of the One so instantly recognisable. In their place is a home button with built-in fingerprint reader that looks like it has been transplanted directly from the iPhone.
While HTC purists might be miffed at this departure from the design aesthetic they’ve come to love, it has been clear for some time that the company needed to do something drastic to revive its flagging fortunes.
The One has always been popular among Android geeks. But that hasn’t translated into mass appeal. Sales of the M9, released earlier this year, have been particularly disappointing and HTC clearly felt it needed to pull something radically different out of the hat with the A9.
If an iPhone clone was all they managed to produce, I’d be deeply worried for them. Fortunately, it looks like the A9 is a lot more than that.
For one thing, it runs the latest version of Android, 6.0 Marshmallow, making HTC the first manufacturer to offer this after Google’s Nexus 5X and 6P devices. It has HTC’s own Sense user interface running on top of Android and while I prefer the pure Android experience, Sense is fairly inoffensive compared to the bloatware some manufacturers cram onto their devices.
I’m not overly upset at the loss of the BoomSound stero speakers, preferring to use headphones to listen to music or watch video.
So I was thrilled to see that the A9 supports high-resolution audio and Dolby surround sound for headphones.
HTC has also included a digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) that upscales 16-bit audio to 24-bit so you can get the best out of expensive, high-end headphones.
Another big plus is the camera. The snapper on the M9 was a huge disappointment and, I’m sure, one of the reasons the phone flopped.
HTC has more than made up for this with the 13MP camera on the A9. Optical image stablisation, absent since 2013’s M7, makes a welcome comeback. Options include RAW support and a new Pro mode with advanced, DSLR-like controls.
The front-facing “selfie” camera also looks to be a winner, featuring as it does HTC’s highly regarded UltraPixel technology.
On the negative side, HTC has had to use a rather small 2 150 mAh battery to slim down the A9 to iPhone dimensions. This at a time when the norm is 3 000 mAh or more.
I’m hoping that this will be partially offset by the fact that the screen is 1080p rather than Quad-HD like many new smartphones. A more efficient processor and the fact that it runs Android 6.0 should also help.
The HTC One A9 will start rolling out globally from early next month. There’s no South African release date yet, but it should be here before the end of the year.
There’s also no word on prices, although the proposed international price of $450-$499 (R6 000-R6 600) will put it firmly in iPhone 6S and Samsung Galaxy S6 territory.
Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter @alanqcooper.