HTC put a lot of effort in the design and claims that the One A9 is designed from scratch, although it takes a few elements from both competition as well as HTC's own previously available smartphones like the One M7. Featuring a unibody made entirely of metal, the HTC One A9 measures at 145.8x70.8x7.3mm and weighs 143g, making it a rather compact smartphone in the world of 5.0-inchers. Despite its all-metal design and 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4 on top of the 5.0-inch AMOLED screen, the HTC One A9 still has a rather thick bezels, with screen-to-body ratio of 67 percent.

HTC equipped the One A9 with a 5.0-inch 1920x1080 resolution AMOLED screen (440ppi) protected by 2.5D Gorilla Glass 4. It is also the first smartphone to use Qualcomm's 64-bit Snapdragon 617 SoC with an octa-core CPU part with four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.2GHz, paired up with Adreno 405 GPU. The HTC One A9 will be available in two versions, packing 16GB of internal storage and 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage and 3GB of RAM.

HTC equipped the new One A9 with a 13-megapixel sensor main rear camera with optical image stabilization. It is limited to 1080p video recording, since the Snapdragon 617 does not support 4K, but it can capture RAW images. The front camera features a 4-megapixel UltraPixel sensor with F/2.0 aperture.

The rest of the specifications a microSD card slot, LTE cat.7 support, 802.11ac dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1, fingerprint scanner located in the front home button, 2,150mAh battery with support for Quick Charge 3.0 (although only Quick Charge 2.0 will be available at launch),  and all the usual sensors. While it lacks stereo speakers with BoomSound, HTC implemented BoomSound with the new headset that will be bundled with the smartphone. HTC One A9 lacks the USB Type-C port but it will be one of the first HTC smartphones to run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS.

HTC has also launched a new Dot View II case which will bring enhanced gesture controls, as well as the new HTC Pro Studio In-Ear headphones, with aforementioned BoomSound support.

The HTC One A9 will launch early next month with a price starting at US $399.99, and will be available in Opal Silver, Carbon Grey, Deep Garnet and Topaz Gold.