I'm hoping that all these recent leaks that are saying it's basically a thicker M8 end up being the best shell game a manufacturer has ever done.
Don't get me wrong, the M7 and M8 (owned both) are great looking smartphones and HTC is my favorite Android OEM, but HTC is in no position to play it safe. The average consumer knows next to nothing about HTC and pretty much just focuses on iPhone and Samsung due to their marketing clout. For the most part, only us fans typically praise the brand. While many may like a similar design (referring to the fans) I'm guessing that most won't. Not because the M8 isn't a great looking smartphone, but mostly because HTC has to stop playing it safe and truly make a "revolutionary" phone if it wants to get more popular. Trying to "fix" last year's problems is not good enough. For example, looking at the most recent rumors, the M9 is basically appearing to be what the M8 should have been (better camera, slightly better battery life). And, the M8 ended up only being slightly better than the M7 (microSD, modified design). It's as if someone at HTC reads blogs AFTER their phone comes out and then just tries to fix some complaints with the next phone and leaves it at that - rather than trying to also improve on the phone in the process.
If the M9 ends up being what the recent leaks are saying, HTC will have a bad year and Samsung will get a sigh of relief having little to no real Android competition that's not a Nexus. Not because the M9 will be a bad phone (we all know it will end up being quite well regardless of how it looks), but because it's simply not a strong enough push forward when compared to their competition. Plus, it doesn't help that those leaked renders look so freaking sexy and everyone is basically on board with them.
I'm sincerely hoping - for HTC's sake - that the renders end up being true and not the most recent leaks showcasing a thicker M8. To me, if you're going to keep the design the same, then the "whole" design needs to stay the same (including dimensions). At least that way I can keep my cases. But basically just making it thicker with the same look will irritate a lot of people.
I'm really hoping for a surprise here because I want to see HTC succeed. We need companies like HTC to be bigger and not let the bigger dominate by being lazy and just having tons of marketing cash (looking at you Samsung).
For what it's worth: Spigen is showing cases and I find it interesting that they show some cases with the renders front and another with the recently leaked front:
http://www.spigen.com/brands/htc/htc-one-m9/htc-one-m9-case-capsule.html
This could mean we're looking at two different designs under the M9 brand or simply that they really just don't know yet what the front looks like. Seems pretty confirmed what the back looks like though because that's been pretty consistent.
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