The HTC One was an absolutely beautiful smartphone but a combination of manufacturing woes, law suits from Nokia and seriously strong competition, in the form of Samsung’s Galaxy S4, meant that it failed to meet expectations. Last night the Taiwanese company took the wraps off of the 2014 editions of its flagship smartphone, the new HTC One, an evolution of last year’s phone more than a complete overhaul.
Much like the Sony Xperia Z2 and the Samsung Galaxy S5 that we saw at Mobile World Congress last month, the new HTC One features Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 801 processor along with 2GB of RAM and runs on the latest version of Android 4.4 KitKat with a new version of HTC’s Sense 6. The display has increased to 5-inches but maintains its 1080p resolution while the battery gets a boost from 2300mAh to a more respectable 2600mAh.
The battery life also benefits from a new ‘Extreme Power Saving Mode’ which, HTC claims, makes it possible to extend battery life to 15 hours with just 5 percent battery left, and up to two weeks if the One is fully charged. To manage this un-smartphone like feat, all wireless connections and background apps are turned off which transforms the HTC One into a feature phone, not something you will use every day, but a feature that many may find invaluable one day.
The two biggest features of last year’s model make a comeback in the new HTC One, with BoomSound stereo speakers and the same 4MP UltraPixel camera making a return albeit with improvements. The camera gets a friend in the form of a depth-sensing camera that creates, what HTC is calling, a Duo Camera array that allows for all sorts of Lytro like post-processing such as blurring the backgrounds or changing the focus point in photos. The BoomSound speakers on the other hand gets a new dedicated amplifier and a more powerful digital signal processing (DSP) chip. The speakers themselves have also been moved deeper into the phone’s chassis, which, once again according to HTC, should produce richer, louder audio with a noticeable improvement in low-end bass notes.
We can’t wait to get our grubby paws on the latest version of the HTC One when it arrives in South Africa, hopefully some time in April if our sources are correct.
