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HTC reveals One M9 and VR headset Vive at MWC2015

The same old HTC gets only a hardware upgrade in the One M9 and the Vive VR Headset is debuted, in collaboration with Valve.

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With the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2015 in action people had their eyes on the Taiwanese smartphone maker to launch a successor for the beautiful One M8. With countless leaks for the new device it really wasn’t hard to figure what it would look like. The HTC One M9 is here. But HTC also entered the Virtual Reality Headset space with the HTC Vive. Here is all you need to know about HTC’s MWC announcements.

HTC One M9

HTC unveiled the One M9 at the event and, as it turns out, the leaks were spot on. While a few of us were hoping for a new design, it looks like HTC has other plans. The design is unchanged and, at first glance, the device looks exactly like the phone it replaced. The device still has the same 5-inch 1080p display with front-facing BoomSound speakers at the top and bottom. The One M9 also has a unibody construction; the older flagship was slippery to hold but thankfully this has a better grip. The power button has been moved from the top to the side, a much required design change - wonder what took HTC so long to figure out this one! At the back of the device, the first thing to grab attention is the new, squarish, 20-megapixel camera. The sensor is made by Toshiba and the initial impression seems satisfactory. The lens protrudes out of the body and has sapphire glass, making it scratch resistant. HTC has shifted the 4 UltraPixel camera from the back of the M8 to the front of the M9, sans autofocus

The M9 gets all new internals; the processing is managed by the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 810 processor. The chip is Octa-core with 4 cores clocked at 2GHz and 4 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. Along with the chip, the device has 3GB of RAM. The phone runs Sense UI 7 on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop which supports the 64-bit chipset. Graphics on the phone is handled by the Adreno 430, the graphics chip supports 4K video recording by default. The specifications are such that the phone can run pretty much anything on offer in the Google Play Store.

While the design isn’t something to talk about, the specifications ensure that the phone is powerful enough until the next device comes along.

HTC Vive

Virtual Reality seems to have kindled the interest of smartphone makers these days. After Samsung, Sony, Microsoft and LG, HTC is the newest member of the group. The device in question is Valve’s VR headset, manufactured by HTC, called the Vive. Its HTC’s first attempt at such a device and it looks like they have built a good one.

The Oculus Rift is the device that started it all and, on paper, the Vive is much better. While the Oculus uses a single 1080p panel, the Vive uses 2 panels, one for each eye, giving a better 360 degree view. The display panels have a higher 90FPS refresh rate, much higher than the 75FPS on the Oculus Rift. The higher refresh rate delivers a smoother experience without lags or stutters, making it more realistic.

The device uses an accelerometer, a gyroscope and multiple lasers to track the head movements. There is also a Steam VR base station that can track your motion in a room as big as 15’x15’ . While this is still in the development phase, it’ll be interesting to see the future of VR headsets in tandem with smartphones. You can find out more about the Vive here.

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