Whenever the release of a product in the tech industry is preceded by a lot of hype, the situation ultimately ends in one of two ways – it’s either a huge disappointment, or it stays in the news for many weeks in a positive light. In both cases though, we’ve seen that it’s usually not a very smart idea for a company to jump on the hype train unless they’re absolutely sure they can deliver on the final product in every way customers are expecting them to.
And so when we saw that HTC weren’t really joining in all the hype surrounding the launch of the One M9, that was a sign that maybe the phone isn’t going to be the amazing launch everyone is looking forward to. Maybe it was just meant to be a regular release in the Android market as a follow-up to a very successful phone – and in the end, if people saw it that way, it would have probably been fine.
But instead, the HTC One M9 saw an incredible amount of hype surrounding its launch, mostly based on the popularity of its predecessor, the One M8. The previous device was a huge hit on the Android market, and many were expecting the M9 to follow suit, but it turned out to be nothing of the sort.
The phone launched to somewhat underwhelming responses, and if we could sum up the reactions of most fans around the time of its initial release in a few words, we’d probably go with “that’s it?” – many were apparently expecting a lot more, and some even commented on the price point of the phone, calling it unrealistic for what it offers.
Among the problems that have been pointed out with the device, it seems to have some serious overheating issues, especially during processor-intensive tasks such as streaming videos and downloading content. This has also affected the battery life, as even though the device comes with a serious battery, it still doesn’t last very long under conditions of serious use.
The company didn’t help its case when they showed the M9+ which was limited to certain markets, and all in all the opinion that people seem to have towards the device right now is that it simply underdelivered. It’s not a bad phone by itself and definitely has its merits, but it’s far from the amazing revolutionary launch that people were hyping it up to be. And for what it’s worth, it’s probably not HTC’s fault that this hype was there, as it was mostly coming from their own fans.