While most people are still waiting to get their hands on the HTC U Play and U Ultra that the company announced back in January, HTC is looking forward to April, where they are expected to announce the HTC U. According to VentureBeat, the HTC U is going to be announced in “mid to late April” and then released globally in May. The HTC U is the retail name for the HTC Ocean that was leaked a few months ago, and it’s being put in the position of their high-end flagship smartphone.
The specs of the HTC U include a 5.5-inch QHD display, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor along with a 12-megapixel IMX362 camera sensor on the back, and a 16-megapixel IMX351 camera sensor on the front of the device. There’s no word about the amount of RAM included, but as far as storage goes, the report does mention 64GB or 128GB capacities and a micro SD card slot for expanded storage. On the software front, HTC is said to be using Android 7.1 Nougat along with Sense 9 on the HTC U.
Now the interesting part of the HTC U is the touch sensitive frame. This was something that appeared in some leaked slides a few months ago, and it appears to be making its way to the retail version of this smartphone. According to this report, the feature will be called “Edge Sense” and will allow the user to touch the sides of the device to do different actions, and perhaps the most interesting part of this is that they will be customizable. So you could squeeze the phone or swipe along the side of it to do things like possibly turning down the volume or taking a screenshot.
While we do know a good bit about this smartphone already, there’s still a lot left to find out about this smartphone, which will likely happen over the next few weeks, ahead of the official announcement from HTC. This would be the third smartphone in the HTC U lineup, and it would be their first smartphone with the new Snapdragon 835 chipset, seeing as the HTC U Ultra uses the Snapdragon 821.