The major announcements for Mobile World Congress have been made. HTC released another One, M9. It's the same look with brushed metal and slimmed just a bit where it's unnoticeable (similar to water weight). Even with the faint sight of the brushed back, you can barely tell it's the new M9.
Why change a design that people love? And they even put a traditional camera in it since the majority said the camera was the weak point of the previous generation. It'll be interesting to see how the new processor, the Snapdragon 810, holds up in spite of the overheating issues.
Samsung continued its move away from plastic with the Galaxy S6, leaning uncomfortably close to the iPhone 6 design; just look at the curved edges and speaker:
I used "uncomfortably" since Samsung's marketing scheme was to mock iPhones. Now, without a removable battery, without a micro SD slot, with a fast non-swiping fingerprint reader, and with Samsung Pay, it's looking more like an iPhone more than ever (Just look at those edges). But Samsung Pay will have immediate advantages over Apple Pay since it'll work with traditional swiping machines by mimicking a magnetic card swipe AND NFC (used by Google Wallet and Apple Pay). I'm intrigued to see if the battery can really charge for 10 minute for 4 hours of battery use.
While the significant improvement on the fingerprint reader and the other hardware is nice, I'm sad to see the removable battery go and there is no more water resistance anymore. The essential features haven't changed since the last time I wrote about them. The "grip" of the phone will be interesting with Gorilla Glass 4 on the front and back of the device.
To no one's surprise there is the Galaxy S6 with curved edges on the sides. It does look pretty awesome but I'm skeptical about its durability.
You may have noticed that I left out discussion on HTC's Sense 7 or Samsung's TouchWiz (customized Android) but this was on purpose. While they offer special applications (read: bloatware), I'm in favor of less and would rather have a pure Android experience. So I hope the Samsung S6 has a version of pure Android.