As you’d expect, (almost) all the major carriers and contract resellers have been shy to jump on HTC’s latest premium device, so you’ve got two pick of ’em. Vodacom is the only service provider to have confirmed to carry the device, but true to recent form, they’ll set you back an arm and a leg — it’s offering the One M9 on a R529 per month contract with no upfront charges and a 200MB data cap so you’ll need to up your spend if you’d care for more megabytes.

If you’re after a One M9 with no strings attached, then both Vodacom and Orange Store will all hook you up with one for R10 000 (R10 899 at Vodacom). Unfortunately, there’s not as much movement on that RRP as we tend to see among online retailers.

The phone boasts the same aluminum unibody construction as last year’s model, but with more pronounced curves and even more metal this time around. A full 90 percent of the body is made of aluminum, quite a bit more than the 70 percent on the previous model. That means it’s about 30 grams heavier, but it seems like a small trade-off given the incredible design and spacious 5-inch screen. That panel is still a 1080p S-LCD3 one, which means you can count on the same bright colors and deep blacks. Plus the whole front is protected by a sheet of Gorilla Glass 3. Oh, and before we go any further — the pair of capacitive buttons have been replaced with the standard trio of Android soft keys! (you ca breathe now)

Thanks to the partnership with Brightstar Distribution, the new HTC One is now available in three colors (gunmetal gray, glacial silver and amber gold) at leading retailers with Vodacom and MTN confirming pricing from R499 (R11 119 once-off) while Orange has set theirs at R7 865.

Not so giant HTC has -yesterday- in a press release announced a giant addition to it’s One family; the HTC One Max: an enlarged version of the original One that boosts the size of the 1080p LCD panel up to 5.9 inches while attempting to keep the One’s classy aluminum look and feel. This attempt is made regardless of the impact on general portability — the One Max weighs 217 grams and is over 16 centimeters long and 10.3mm thick, thanks in part to the front-facing BoomSound speakers. And the phablet only gets platter as it contains a bendy 1,200mAh battery to add to the capacity of the built-in (and non-removable) 3,300mAh battery.

Aside from its size, the One Max brings other big changes, including a fingerprint scanner on its rear side. We’ve had the chance to use the scanner and, while it isn’t as neat as the iPhone 5s’s, it does the basic job of letting you log in with a swipe of your fingertip. We’d have happily swapped it out for optical stabilization on the UltraPixel camera, however.

The back cover is now removable, letting you expand the 16GB or 32GB of onboard storage with up to 64GB more via microSD — a feature that was missing on the One and on the One X before that. The One Max sticks with a Snapdragon 600 (with 2GB of RAM) for processing, rather than the superior Snapdragon 800 used in rival devices like the Sony Xperia Z Ultra and Samsung Galaxy Note 3. HTC says global availability will start rolling out as early as this week. As always, we’ll keep you updated on the local release on both these devices, that’s if we hear something.