Back at the end of January HTC said that in 2012 they were going to focus on the quality of their phones and not the quantity of their devices. Apparently, they aren’t going to waste much effort thinking of names for their quality phones either. At Mobile World Congress today HTC announced a lineup of three new phones, all branded under the HTC One umbrella, and all three phones are solid, no, quality devices. First up was is the new HTC One V, the low end. Every news site that is live at MWC is calling this the low end, and it is, but on paper it still seems like it’s going to be a quality device. Bringing back the Android chin at the bottom, the One V is a 3.7″ single core 1GHz powered device with an anemic 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage, but will have a few other goodies that make this phone attractive.
First, it’s going to ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, not Gingerbread. Second, it’s going to include both Beats Audio and the HTC Imagechip for improved image processing. All of this somewhat restrained goodness packed into an aluminum unibody design.
Next up on the HTC One list is the middle of the road One S, and it’s a pretty nice upgrade. The One S carries a 4.3″ Super AMOLED display and is touted as HTC’s thinnest device ever, coming in at 7.6mm thin. The One S offers the same ICS, Beats Audio and HTC Imagechip, but swaps in a 1.5GHz dual core chip and 1GB of RAM with 16GB of storage wrapped in it’s aluminum unibody outer shell.
The 8MP rear camera is the same one that is packed into the One X that we’ll talk about in a minute, but it offers .7 second startup times and an unbelievable .2 second focus time. While some are claiming that the One S breaks from the dated and tired HTC design style, it kind of looks like the same old same old to me, just an awful lot thinner.
Last, we find the new HTC One X, the next flagship device in the HTC fleet. Pump up the One S to a 4.7″ Super LCD display, sub in a quad core Tegra 3 chip and add NFC and 32GB of RAM and you have the One X. Available in black or white, the One X will be made of a new polycarbonate material that HTC claims is totally new to them.
Again, it has the same rounded edge appearance that HTC has been selling for a while, but the design looks to be fresh and clean based on what HTC chose to leave out. All three of these devices will ship with Sense 4 that has been described as a slimmed down, much less intrusive overlay that feels snappy and looks good. There’s also the added benefit of 25GB of free Dropbox storage for 2 years for each One device.
The devil, as they say, is in the details and these phones will be notable as much for what they lack as what they include. Gone are the days of SD cards and removable batteries as these devices won’t have either. They also will use the newer micro SIM card, which I see as a positive but many will see as a limiting factor.
There’s a lot to the new HTC lineup and over the next few days and we’ll update our info as soon as the full specs for each device are made public. HTC stumbled through 2011, here’s to hoping that the new One line of devices helps them to regain their footing in 2012. As a start to the newer quality over quantity HTC I’m hopeful that they stick to that pledge and don’t run out of letters in the alphabet as the year wears on. I’d hate for next year’s models to be the HTC Two.
Source: The Verge | Images: HTC