This particular model is of the 32GB persuasion, and it’s currently up for grabs. It is unlocked to all carriers and doesn’t come with free service, so we have to limit this contest to our South African readers. Follow the instructions below to enter

To Enter:

Simply let us in on your journey of brilliance, it might be a milestone worth sharing or something that happened in your life recently that is just brilliant. Tell us your story in the comments below, we’ll pick our two favourites and we’ll announce our lucky winners. Not sure what we’re talking about? See Ben Matjiu’s interview of brilliance for clues. 

Competition Terms and Conditions

Entries are handled through the Disqus comment widget below only. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win.

Contest is open to all residents of South Africa, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), we really do love all of you.

Winners will be chosen randomly. Two (2) winner will receive the exclusive HTC One A9 smartphone.

 If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond twelve (12)  hours of being contacted, otherwise, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email or Facebook login.

We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes. Entries can be submitted until March 31st at 08h00 AM CAT. Good luck!

Ahead of our HTC brilliance competition going live today, last week I called Ben up for a wide-ranging telephonic interview about his journey to brilliance, alignments with HTC, the company’s present and future devices — particularly around the introduction of Virtual Reality. The news of the day, the HTC One A9, seemed like a good way to kick things off.

The interview has been edited for clarity. 

Papi Mabele: I think the A9 is a good place to start

Ben Matjiu: The A9 is very exciting

Keeping up with the A9, how would you best describe yourself in 9 words?

Uhm.. I have given this some thought, and truth be told I could barely come up with five words. but essentially I am a radio lover, tech lover, trend follower, lover of radio? (laughs) and all round fun guy. I am easy going really.

Fair enough. I am curious though, are you into tech at all?

I do have quite an interest, I mean, I am not a die heart follower of everyday developments but I do stay up tune with the latest trends, device and which does what. So yeah, I do have an interest in tech, its one of my peevs in my spare time. 

You’ve been a product influencer for HTC for a while now, and have been using the A9 smartphone. What’s the stand-out feature of the device for you?

I as fortunate enough to have the M9 before I was summoned with the A9. And I must say I love the entire user experience with HTC devices. Comparing it to iOS – and other leading Android devices – it certainly takess the crown with picture quality and just the easy of using the device, hence the user experience part. The finger print sensing technologies are worth  a mention as well.

Improvements on the A9 compared to previous models that you love?

Definitely the camera. Compared to the M9, the camera has totally changed in design (ui) but produces the highest quality of images. Perfect shots every time.

How did you contribute to the creation of the campaign; ‘journey of brilliance’?

Right, the guys at HTC gathered me pretty much in the final stages of the campaign. This afforded me to add my two cents worth and share my journey of brilliance. With the campaign, we’re inviting South Africans to share their stories of success and, you know, even if it is not a success but a story and milestone and stands out to them – highlighting the positive. This we want to hear, or read about and share with the rest of our HTC community. While I am yet to fully embark on my personal journey to brilliance, I will be sharing it with my friends and followers visually on my social media platforms. Everyday is a journey, I think. 

What app do you use to touch-up your pictures? Or are they perfect ‘raw’?

This would depend on the mood and moment I had just captured. But Google’s Snapseed and Over for overlays never lets me down. 

I am quite a fan of Over myself,  what is your favourite android app at the moment?

I a big on Instagram at the moment – and think I will be for a while. I have also recently caught on on Snapchat as well, I am yet to figure how it exactly works but I love watching my friend’s snaps.

Your worst woe about android handsets?

This one specifically? That’s a good question. Strangely, its the entire feel about the handset, I get the entire fine metal body and aesthetics thereof but it feels rather slippery. And given this is a very good looking phone so I am scared it might fall or get exposed to falls, dents and and.. Overall it feels quite slippery, which I do not like. Sure you could get  a cover or bodyglove for safety, but that too will hide all the precious metal. 

For those wanting to embark on their own journey of brilliance, what would you say/advice to them?

Man, oh man… The journey of brilliance is not about chasing something that other people have set out. It’s about what each person deems to be brilliant within their own world.
The biggest thing to learn or know about embarking on a journey of brilliance is beginning…once you start you’re on your way to doing what ever you like.

Courtesy of HTC South Africa, we’re giving away two (2) HTC One A9 smartphones during the month of March. Click on the image below for details.

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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 music-streaming service, which Microsoft sold to messaging company Line last year, announced earlier this week that its app will be available on iOS and Android. MixRadio’s main feature is serving up personalized playlists to listeners for free, across hundreds of genre- and artist-based channels, slightly similar to what Pandora does. Interestingly enough, the service has also revealed a partnership with HTC; what this means is you’ll start seeing MixRadio curate stories for BlinkFeed, the smartphone maker’s customizable news stream. The service is immediately available in SA, for free nogals.

The HTC One M8’s luxurious aluminium body provides a stunning and sturdy platform for this top-flight smartphone’s brilliant 5-inch display. This elegant beauty runs on a powerful quad-core processor and Android 4.4 KitKat, with a stereo speaker delivering excellent sound, with a depth-sensing DUO camera with Ultrapixels, HTC Zoe that captures up to 20 photos and a 3-second video to create an animated gallery with one click. 20 hours of talk time battery life, 13.6 days standby time. On top of that there’s a good CPU and RAM combo, a more-than-enough 32GB of storage and a 128GB Expandable Memory Slot and top-end Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G / 4G connections.

HTC has also brought support for notifications from third-party apps like Foursquare and Fitbit into the BlinkFeed fold. This complements existing alerts and content from social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ that were already within BlinkFeed’s reach. Although Elegant style, raw power, and sophisticated features make the HTC One M8 an excellent smart phone choice for anyone who’s interested in unrivalled performance, the battery does not seem to be able to cope with the high energy demands required from a device which does so much.

Unfortunately but inevitably all batteries run out, the M8 battery is not user-removable, making it harder to replace once the battery eventually does wear out. The phone’s sealed chassis is not water-resistant, and the photos look less sharp than its competitors which, when considering the quality that was intended, is quite a shock. The HTC One M8 competes against its opponent’s freshest mobile machine, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and it does not disappoint. You could argue that on eye level, it looks far too much like a BlackBerry Z10 and has some similar characteristics of an iPhone 5, but in the hand the elegant curved back brings a whole new feature to the market.

The One M8 is undoubtedly the most impressive handset the company has released to date and is set to retail from R399 pm on a 24 month ontract at your usual retailers.

If your first impression of the Lumia 1020 was like ours, we’re guessing you had a hard time differentiating it from last year’s flagship 925 model. Take a closer look, turn it around even, however, and it becomes more apparent that Nokia’s design team didn’t actually use the past year to catch up on the sleep it lost crafting the 925. The phone maker kept to the same overall style, but it made a few crucial tweaks along the way to improve its fit and finish.

Nokia’s choice of build material wasn’t one of them. If you are a critic of the Lumia plastic construction, you’ll be disappointed with its successor — the company’s continuing its long-standing tradition of keeping metal out of the assembly lines, building the entire device out of polycarbonate.

The biggest benefit in using this type of material is that it offers a little more give when you drop the phone. It’s still plenty sturdy, and it feels like it’s just as durable as the 925. This may be ideal for a large number of potential buyers, but we still prefer the HTC One’s premium build quality and visual appeal, thanks to its use of high-grade aluminum through its entire unibody chassis.

The back of the Lumia 1020 looks different from its Lumia cousins, thanks largely to the 41-megapixel camera module that sticks out of the back. However, the bulge is not as big a problem with the 1020 as it was with the Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 was not the easiest phone to carry around, measuring 13.95mm at its thinnest and 17.95mm thick at the camera module. The Lumia 1020, however, is just 10.40mm at its thickest (you guessed it, the camera module), and the bulge as compared to the rest of the body is not as pronounced as the one in the 808. However, the phone is unable to lie flat on its back; instead it rests at an angle that makes it easier to glance the screen if you are looking from front, an unintended benefit. The phone weighs 158 grams, but doesn’t feel too heavy.

The Lumia 1020 is available in Yellow and White colour options, in addition to the Black that we received as our review unit. The display on the 1020 is bright and the colour reproduction closer to the real world when compared with most other AMOLED displays, similar to what we noted in our Nokia Lumia 925 review.

Nokia claims that its ClearBlack technology ensures that users see truer blacks, which in turn enhances the contrast of the display, thanks mainly to reduced reflections on the screen. The result is a screen that is easy to use, even in bright sunlight.

Needless to say, the highlight of the Nokia Lumia 1020 is its 41-megapixel camera, so we’ll be focusing most of our energy on this section. While the sensor inside the Lumia 1020 is 41-megapixel, the pictures it clicks are either 38-megapixel or 34-megapixel, depending upon if you are clicking pictures in 4:3 mode or 16:9, similar to what we saw in the Nokia 808 PureView.

While Nokia has worked hard to improve the hardware behind the camera, the software side seems to have regressed a bit. The default camera app on the Lumia 1020 is Nokia Pro Cam that seems to be lacking a few options found in the year-old Nokia. With the 808 you could choose to simultaneously click photographs in 2-megapixel, 3-megapixel, 5-megapixel or 8-megapixel effective resolutions, in addition to 34-megapixel or 38-megapixel full blown images. With the 1020, however, you are limited to a 5-megapixel image in addition to the 34-megapixel (16:9 mode) and 38-megapixel (4:3 mode) full-sized image.

Having said that, Nokia Pro Cam offers plenty of control to experienced users letting them adjust the exposure, shutter speed, ISO, white balance and, of course, focus as per their needs. This can be done using controls at the top right (while holding the phone in landscape mode) of the screen or by dragging the on-screen click button to the left to reveal a grid of circular lines. The app also gives a live preview of how the resultant image would look when you, say, adjust the white balance. The app also offers options for shutter delay and exposure bracketing, which can be used for creating manual HDR images.

Nokia Pro Cam is one of the many camera apps (or lenses as they are called in Windows Phone) installed on the Lumia 1020 and that can be a little confusing for users. You can switch to any of these apps by clicking the switch lens button on the bottom right of the screen, but remember that only the Nokia Pro Cam can take 34-/38-megapixel pictures. The other lenses (apps) that the Lumia 1020 ships with are Bing Vision, Camera360, the default Windows Phone Camera, Nokia Cinemagraph, Nokia Smart Cam, Panorama and Vyclone.

The Lumia 1020 comes with 32GB of non-expandable storage, with 29.12GB available for the end user. While that seems like plenty of storage, on a phone that captures large-sized images, an option to have expandable storage would’ve been nice. In case you are wondering, the 1020 comes with FM radio support, which can be utilised thanks to the pre-installed Amber Update. Nokia Lumia 1020 is priced at R10 000 which makes it slightly more expensive than the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, and considerably pricier than other flagship devices like the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, Sony Xperia Z1 and Sony Xperia Z Ultra.

Yes, shutterbugs will love the Lumia 1020 camera, but at the price tag one has to wonder if they are perhaps better off buying a point-and-shoot camera, which are getting smaller, easier to carry bodies and bigger sensors, and a mid-level smartphone. If you want one that runs Windows Phone, pick the Nokia Lumia 925 which is still our favourite Windows Phone running device.

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.