Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has been having a nightmarish time of late. The company has been struggling to shift inventory in the face of still competition from the likes of Samsung and Apple in Western markets and upstarts like Xiaomi and Asus in countries like China and India. While its struggles have been well-documented, and its One M9 has squarely failed to impress consumers, the company still firmly believes that it can turn around its fortunes over the next few quarters. With a view towards doing just that, the company had launched the curiously named J Butterfly smartphone in Japan earlier this year as a successor to the HTC Butterfly 2, which was released last year.
While the HTC J Butterfly was clearly marked as a Japan-exclusive, many would have expected the device to see a wider international launch at some stage during the year. That seemed to have happened on Tuesday, when HTC announced a device called the Butterfly 3, along with the One M9+ Aurora Edition at a press conference the company had organized in Tokyo, Japan. But on Wednesday, HTC made it amply clear that the Butterfly 3 is not meant for a global release. The phone, which is a re-branded J Butterfly for the most part, will only be launched in Taiwan, if a tweet from a senior HTC official is to be believed. Rebuffing media reports that claimed the Butterfly 3 will be launched globally, Mr. Jeff Gordon, the Senior Global Online Communications Manager at HTC, tweeted, “I don’t know where this news cycle started that HTC announced Butterfly 3 for global distribution. It’s only announced for Japan and Taiwan”.
So basically, as things stand now, the Butterfly 3 / J Butterfly will not be available outside of Taiwan / Japan, as the case may be. People living outside these regions but wanting to pick up the handset will either have to look elsewhere or order online from e-commerce vendors in the region. As for the phone itself, the device features a 5.2-inch QHD display panel, and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 SoC. The smartphone comes with a 20.2-megapixel primary camera and a 13-megapixel front-facing camera, and comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed.