Taiwan based HTC has unveiled the new HTC One in Taiwan on Thursday with elegant metal and revamped designs which analysts said may boost the company’s sluggish sales against rivals Apple and Samsung. HTC had organised purview events for its flagship smartphone HTC One few days ago in Delhi and Mumbai, and informed the tech media that this smartphone will debut in India sometimes in April.
“New HTC One is a breakthrough,” company president Peter Chou told thousands of fans gathered in downtown Taipei.
At the centre of the gadget is new software that turns the home screen into a platform including social networking updates, news articles, photos and videos. “Users no longer need to go to separate applications to find out what’s happening,” Chou said. To enable this new approach to the gadget, HTC will also provide local and global content from some 1,400 media sources with more than 10,000 articles per day. Among the content providers are AFP, the AOL family of media properties and ESPN.
The HTC ONE is elegantly designed and has refined metallic body, and features 4.7-inch full HD 1080p display WITH 468 ppi, compared to 326 ppi available on iPhone 5. This smartphone is powered by a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with HTC Sense 5.
Other key features of HTC One are :
HTC ZOE : HTC ONE is equipped with 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera. All you need to do is to simply press the shutter and the HTC One automatically captures up to 20 photos and a 3-second video—a picture that’s alive. So your entire photo album becomes a living, breathing gallery.
HTC BoomSound : Most of the smartphones give frustrating experience while sharing music and video with friends. But the HTC one comes with dual frontal stereo speakers powered by built-in amplifiers, which deliver bigger sound with less distortion and more detail.The two front-facing stereo speakers can also be used as remote control for most TVs, set-top boxes and receivers. Moreover, this smartphone gives studio-quality sound with Beats Audio, which is one of the innovative features of HTC.
Sense Voice : This feature solves the problem of talking on the phone in any loud, crowded environment, which is a challenge sometimes. The HTC ONE sports dual built-in microphones that detect loud ambient noise, which dynamically boost the in-call voice to compensate.
Analysts said the flagship smartphone, selling for a minimum of Tw$20,000 ($670), is expected to boost the company’s sales, which in February plunged 44 percent year-on to $384 million, the lowest since January 2010.
In the Indian context, the price of HTC one works out to approximately Rs. 37,000 without adding custom duty and other incidental expenses. To our reckoning, the HTC one will be priced around Rs, 40,000 in India when it touches the Indian shores. This price may prove prohibitive keeping in view of the fact that Sony’s recently launched Xperia Z is priced Rs. 39,000 and the Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S IV is going to be launched in US on 14th March and going by the huge acceptance of Galaxy range in India, it is expected that the new marvel of Samsung will give priority for its launch in India.
It will not be cake walk for HTC One not only in India but in emerging markets like China, where Huawei and ZTE are getting aggressive with their flagship smartphones. HTC will have to devise strategies out of the box to move its new flagship device in good numbers.
