HTC One A9 ‘Aero’ poses for the camera ahead of its October 20 launch

HTC hasn’t had the best of years when it comes to sales and financials, but an exciting new product could be the thing to really boost sales for the struggling OEM. On October 20th, HTC will unveil their latest phone, which is almost certainly going to be called the HTC One A9 ‘Aero’. We’ve seen rumours of the phone, including renders and branding, now leaker @onleaks has shown the phone off in our best look yet.

The phone appears to be very slim in design and appears to be constructed of aluminium like their One series. The phone has a volume rocker and textured power button mounted on the right hand side and what appears to be a SIM slot and microSD (or second SIM slot) on the left hand side. The front of the phone features a physical button, which like the HTC One M9+ is most likely a front mounted fingerprint sensor.

The bottom of the phone shows a micro-USB port (no USB-C here), as well as a microphone, 3.5mm headphone jack and a single speaker. On the top is what appears to be a plastic mounted section which on the previously released One series has hidden an IR sensor – but there’s no guarantees with the One A9.

Design wise, the phone has been described as an iPhone clone, but while that has a kernel of truth in it, the phone also appears to have a distinctly HTC feel to the design as well.

Under the hood, Evan Blass has noted previously that the One A9 will come with a Snapdragon 617 SoC with 2GB of RAM, a 5″ FHD (1920×1080) resolution AMOLED display and 16GB of on-board storage with a microSD card slot. The HTC One A9 will feature a 2150mAh battery powering the phone as well. That centre mounted camera you see on the rear will be a 13MP sensor, while on the front you’ll find the HTC Ultra-Pixel camera a mainstay in their higher end range with Evan listing 4UP. The cameras will feature Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) with backside illumination (BSI).

The biggest news of the release is that HTC have said that this phone will be the first device launched with the latest version of Android – 6.0 Marshmallow – which will obviously have HTC’s sense overlay built-in.

With just over a week to wait until we see what HTC has to announce. The event will take place on-line starting at 12pm New York City time (Wednesday, 21 October 2015 at 3:00AM AEST) with HTC streaming the event virtually through the www.htc.com/launch website. Tune in and see what all the fuss is about next Wednesday morning and we’ll try to get as much information on a local launch as we can.