HTC recently debuted their newest flagship, the third generation HTC One called M9. We’ve had our hands on with it and Cam unboxed the international unlocked model but here we have the US T-Mobile M9 so why not unbox it and take a quick look?

I won’t bore you with endless talk on the box. It looks rather similar to the international box you saw on Cam’s unboxing but it just has T-Mobile written next to the HTC One M9 logo. Other than that, it looks identical to all the other boxes.

Let’s go ahead and lift up the lid to reveal the HTC One M9 sitting on the left with some information about HTC’s Uh-Oh Protection, which basically says that if you break your phone within a year, they’ll replace it. Or if you’re really careful with your phone, they’ll send you a $100 gift card towards the next HTC One purchase so perhaps they’re already talking about the HTC One M10.

Moving the phone aside, we’ll reveal the charger and microUSB cable, and a chunk of bounded paper with some words on it. Now moving back to the phone, well this is the brand new HTC One M9, a phone you’ll likely see plenty of times here on PhoneDog.com. And as you can see, we have the silver on gold model; which I have to say really looks rather good.

Up front we have a 5-inch IPS LCD 3 display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, surrounded by a very nice aluminum uni-body construction. There’s also a 5-ultrapixel front-facing camera and we mustn’t forget the two Boom Sound Speakers, which are now powered by Dolby Digital. The speakers are a little smaller in size when compared to the HTC One M8. But we have been assured that they sound even more loud and better sounding.

Turning this guy over to the sides and we’ll find your SIM card slot, a microSD card slot, volume rockers and a lock, which now lives on the side of the phone. Now on the top, we just have a place for your IR blaster to live. On the bottom is where the 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB port all live. On the back side, you’ll find your typical HTC design but with a huge change. A squarish-looking camera module and that’s because it’s packing a 20MP Sony sensor, which will do 4K UHD video and take well 20MP photos.

On the inside, the HTC One M9 has some decent upgrades. We’re talking about a new Snapdragon 810 octa-core processor with 1 2GHz quad-core chip next to 1 1.5GHz quad-core chip alongside 3GB of RAM, and the Adreno 430 GPU. And to power all of that is still a rather smallish 2840 mAh battery, which is 240 mAh bigger than the HTC One M8.

Turning this guy on, we’ll go through your normal HTC and in this case T-Mobile fare. The set-up is a mix of HTC Sense 7 and stock Android Lollipop when you’re setting up your accounts. But once you’re in, you’re greeted with HTC Sense 7 on top of Android Lollipop 5.0.2. The biggest changes to Sense come in the form of aesthetics, color scheme and also customization. But the overall user interface and interactions are all about the same as last year. BlinkFeed still lives on the left hand side of the home screen, it’s pretty much untouched from last year and you can open up your vertical app springboard just like before.

One difference though is on the Smart Apps selection you see here on the home screen. This is actually a preloaded HTC widget that organizes the most used applications, depending on where you are. So you could either be at home, work or out and it will show you the most used applications. You can also disable this if you do not like it by just simply dragging the widget off the screen.

Now the overall fluidity of the HTC One M9 is pretty darn good, probably one of the smoothest devices I’ve used so far. But we’ll definitely put this phone through the test to report back to you in a full review. Our review is going to be published a couple of days after this video has been posted but I’ve had my HTC One M9 unit since March 24 of 2015. We were not able to report up until March 30th.

So make sure to keep your eyes on your sub-box for our full in depth review of the HTC One M9 and also our head to head dogfight between this phone and the Samsung Galaxy S6. All of these will be coming in the next few days.