After launching one of the first Full HD smartphones in the world, HTC has decided to update its once flagship Android phone with a new design and a bunch of features it introduced not so long ago in the HTC One.
The Taiwanese company revealed today the Butterfly S; a 5-inch Full HD smartphone running Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 along with a host of HTC’s new features. That 5-inch Super LCD 3 display rocks the Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080, offering a crisp 440 pixels per inch underneath scratch resistant glass.
Inside the phone there’s a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor bundled with 2GB of RAM and HTC’s new ImageChip 2 sensor, which features in the HTC One. This sensor pairs up with the very same 4 megapixel ‘UltraPixel’ camera as on the HTC One and offers the same snazzy features including HTC Zoe. There’s also a 2.1 megapixel front facing camera and 16GB of internal storage, which, unlike the One, can be expanded upon thanks to the addition of a micro SD card slot.
The Butterfly S runs Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 along with HTC’s latest Sense user interface, and thanks to an inbuilt IR blaster you can program it to be a remote for TVs, cable boxes and DVD players. There’s also Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, GPS and quad band WCDMA for mobile networks.
Either side of the display sit two speakers which of course link up with HTC’s favourite Beats Audio technology to form the company’s latest buzz-feature, BoomSound. From what we’ve seen on the One, this will offer excellent audio quality both through headphones and through the dual stereo speakers for mobile gaming and movie watching.
The Butterfly S measures up at 144.5 x 70.5 x 10.6 mm and weighs a rather hefty 160g, which makes it a fair bit thicker and heavier than the One. We reckon the reason for this is the hefty 3,200 mAh battery which has been whacked in as an upgrade, which would certainly balance out the extra heft by adding hours of battery life.
Unfortunately, as with the original HTC Butterfly, the Butterfly S is currently only bound for China and the China Telecom network, arriving next month. We’re hoping a variant suitable for the UK and Europe will come along shortly after – fingers crossed.