[One (M9) General] Gambler_3:
I was sick and tired of the OG Moto G due to increasingly poor performance so it was time to upgrade. After much deliberation I decided to buy the HTC One M9 a rather unpopular choice it seems. However in my opinion there are many reasons to buy it even now.

1. At $450 this offered great value for money that rivals pretty much anything else you can buy right now in that price.

2. The build quality, looks and ergonomics are phenomenal. Yes if you previously used the M8 or even the M7 the design may not wow you but for those of us who are buying an HTC phone for the first time it's still quite magical. In my opinion this trumps the Galaxy S6 and Xperia Z3 in all design departments but of course this is subjective.

3. Near perfect screen. Now I don't really know what the fuss was about the screen being not as good as the M8. Maybe it isn't as I haven't used the M8 but it is nevertheless absolutely fantastic. I am VERY picky on display quality and I could honestly not ask for anything better from an LCD screen.

4. Absolutely STELLAR performance. I feel we focus too much on benchmarks and not on the real world performance. Not only does it zip through literally everything but the multi-tasking performance is literally second to none. It absolutely destroys the Galaxy S6 in this department and it really is as good as it gets. The NAND performance is also great something that's also not given as much importance as it should be.

5. Reasonable size. While it's taller than I would ideally like but at least it's not uncomfortably wide which means one handed use is very much possible.

6. Best audio experience bar none. The speakers aren't the loudest but they are loud enough that I never felt a need for more while watching videos or talking on speaker, the quality is excellent for mobile speakers and the placement is perfect. The output from headphones is just mind blowing, first phone I have ever used that can actually power my Sennheiser 598 headphones without feeling under powered.

7. Really good selfie camera. The use of the front camera has shot so exponentially in the last year that it deserves a mention if a phone does really good at it. Some of the most important and memorable moments are captured from the front camera these days.

Now on to a few not so good things.

1. Back camera is behind the competition. While I am sure you guys would know this already and this is one of the biggest reasons why people don't recommend this phone. I personally don't care so much about camera so I could accept this compromise. And yes the camera is not as good as most of the recent flagship phones but it isn't nearly as bad as is sometimes portrayed. It isn't going to take embarrassingly bad pictures and is not going to be destroyed by a random 3 year old phone. Daylight photography is actually pretty great in my opinion.

2. Run of the mill battery life. This is not really a negative because it isn't any worse than most of it's competitors but it would have been nice to have been a star performer in this category.

3. No fingerprint sensor.

4. The placement of the buttons is questionable. While I don't have any issue with the placement of the power button but what creates a problem is the presence of the 2 volume buttons right on top of it. I believe if they want all buttons on 1 side then they should use a volume rocker to eliminate any confusion, a textured power button isn't enough. However best configuration would be to have the volume buttons on the other side. Taking pics with the volume buttons is also problematic due to this.

So bottom line is in my opinion that if you can live without having the best back camera and fingerprint sensor then this phone is still a better deal than the Nexus 5X and Xperia Z5 Compact.