HTC One M9 Plus may miss out on UK release date

The HTC One M9 Plus is coming to Europe. Originally launched as a China exclusive, the suped-up version of HTC’s flagship One M9 will be making it way west in the coming months. However, it may still miss out on a UK release, as an HTC spokesperson told Expert Reviews that it currently has no upcoming plans to range the phone in the UK. 

This is a shame, as the One M9 Plus is arguably the superior handset compared to HTC’s rather underwhelming One M9. For starters it has a 2,560×1,440 display, giving it the same resolution to compete with Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge and the LG G4. It also has 3GB of RAM, but unlike the One M9, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chip, the One M9 Plus runs on an octa-core 2.2GHz MediaTek MT6795T chip. This may have an impact on graphics performance, as MediaTek chips we’ve tested in the past often struggle to keep up with their Qualcomm counterparts, but day-to-day performance should still be pretty fast.

The Plus has a fingerprint scanner, too, which is something the One M9 is currently lacking. It also uses the same Duo camera from the One M8, but has a 20-megapixel resolution instead of 4 megapixels. This should hopefully iron out the problems we had with the murky low-res shots we took with the One M8, but given the One M9’s current camera issues, we’ll have to wait and see how it fares in testing if it ever makes it way over here. 

The One M9 Plus will e available in gold, gunmetal grey and a silver and gold combination, but so far there’s been very little confirmation of which European countries it will be coming to first, or how much it will cost. All HTC has said so far is that it will be announcing price and availability on a market-by-market basis.