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The man who seems to be officially in charge of announcing HTC’s smartphone plans on Twitter, was back on the microblogging platform on Friday, December 11. Mr. Mo Versi, the Vice President of Product Management at HTC, while responding to a query aimed at him on Twitter, revealed that the Canadian version of the One M9 will get its first taste of Marshmallow “early next year”, without elaborating any further as to what exactly is meant by ‘early’. Mr. Versi further clarified that the device will get Android 6.0, and not 6.0.1, when the update goes live next year for the Canadian version of the smartphone. In the US, meanwhile, the One M9 is scheduled to get Android 6.0.1 this month itself, alongside the other premium smartphone released by the company this year, the One A9, which was already released with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box.
Just a few weeks back, one of Canada’s big three carriers, Telus Mobililty, announced its new software update schedule, thereby revealing that the two aforementioned premium handsets from HTC will both get the taste of Marshmallow sooner rather than later. As per the publicly-released schedule, the One M8 will receive the update as early as the 17th of this month, while the One M9 will get the latest version of Android on the 21st of January. The latest assertion from Mr. Versi therefore, just falls perfectly in line with that previous report, meaning this year’s flagship smartphone from the Taiwanese manufacturer will, in all likelihood, get the much-awaited update next month itself.
Coming to what can be expected from the impending Marshmallow update for the One M9, the latest and greatest version of Android is expected to bring along some cool new features, even though it is only an incremental update over Lollipop. Marshmallow includes an app permissions manager, native support for fingerprint scanner, Google Now on Tap, an all-new app drawer, more intuitive volume controls and of course, the battery saving feature called ‘Doze’ that disables network access for low-priority apps when the phone’s not in use. The latest version of Android also includes native support for 4K display resolution, but that feature will only be useful to devices that actually sports a 4K display like the Xperia Z5 Premium from Sony.