HTC is arguably the only company which can match Apple for smartphone design and with the HTC One A9 it's clearly been heavily inspired by its rival too.
But while the look might be familiar there are quite a few differences between the HTC One A9 and the iPhone 6S, not least the fact that while Apple's phone is a flagship, HTC's isn't quite, no matter how much it might look like one. But that's not the only difference, there's much, much more.
Design
If it weren't for the logos the HTC One A9 and iPhone 6S could almost be hard to tell apart at first glance. Both have fairly plain metal shells with antenna lines running along near the top and bottom, both have slightly rounded corners and both have fingerprint scanners below the screen.
They're even almost identically thin, with the iPhone 6S coming in at 7.1mm thick while the HTC One A9 is a marginally chunkier 7.26mm. Both also weigh exactly the same at 143g.
Look closer though and there are some differences. Those fingerprint scanners are different shapes for one thing. The Touch ID scanner on the iPhone 6S is circular, while the HTC One A9's scanner is more of an oblong shape.
Their cameras are positioned differently too, with the HTC One A9's rear snapper sitting centrally, while the iPhone 6S has a camera off to the side. Thickness aside they have different dimensions too, with the iPhone 6S being 138.3 x 76.1mm, while the HTC One A9 is 145.75 x 70.8mm.
So the A9 isn't quite similar enough to be considered a copy, but it's definitely reminiscent of Apple's phone. As such it also looks similarly good, but less original.
Display
With its 5-inch display the HTC One A9 isn't a massive smartphone, but it's still bigger than the 4.7-inch iPhone 6S. It's higher resolution too, at 1080 x 1920, compared to the 750 x 1334 iPhone 6S screen.
Neither phone can challenge the likes of the QHD Samsung Galaxy S6 for resolution, but they're both fairly sharp. The iPhone 6S also has an impressively colourful display, though the contrast ratio isn't the best. It remains to be seen how good the A9's is in practice, but hopefully it's brighter than the HTC One M9's screen.
One big trick Apple's phone does have, which the HTC One A9 can't match, is 3D Touch. This allows the display to respond differently to different levels of pressure and it has the potential to completely change the way we use our phones, but only once it's embraced in clever ways by a large number of apps and games.
Power and performance
The HTC One A9 has an octa-core Snapdragon 617 chip with four cores clocked at 1.5GHz and four running at 1.2GHz. That's a new 64-bit chip, but it's a more mid-range one than the Snapdragon 810 found in flagships like the HTC One M9.
As such we don't expect performance to be at quite a top tier level, though it is helped out by a generous 3GB of RAM.
The iPhone 6S sounds even less impressive with its 1.84GHz dual-core Apple A9 processor and 2GB of RAM, but it's more than capable of smoothly speeding through apps and games and can hold its own against the latest Android flagships.
You'll also get more built in storage from the iPhone 6S, as it's available with 16, 64 or 128GB, but there's no microSD card slot. The HTC One A9 on the other hand tops out at 32GB (the UK is only getting the 16GB model), but add a microSD card into the mix and you can get up to 2TB more.
