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HTC CEO Peter Chou took to the stage at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Sunday to unveil three new handsets under a single family branding: the One X, the S and the V.
(Credit: HTC/CBSi)
Unified by a few key technologies, the “One” brand is HTC’s first attempt at producing a singular collective of product, and is a significantly different approach to the way in which the company launched seven handsets and a tablet at MWC in Barcelona last year.
The inclusion of new imaging technology and Beats Audio software is common to all of its latest announcements. The image capabilities, known as ImageSense, sound particularly impressive, with HTC claiming that it takes less than one second to launch the camera from the lock screen, and less than one second again for the autofocus to prepare for your next shot.
The One X is the big brother of the family, and, in line with recent speculation, will be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor. The handset sports a 4.7-inch 720p HD-resolution display with a Super LCD 2 panel. HTC promises that the screen will handle the glare of natural light better than in previous phones, and that it has a wider viewing angle, as well. HTC also announced the One XL, a 4G version of the One X for AT&T in the US, which trades the quad-core processor of the X for a dual-core processor with LTE support.
The middle child is known as the One S, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. Its display is slightly smaller and lower res than the One X, at 4.3 inches diagonally, and has a qHD-resolution Super AMOLED panel.
In regards to the One V, the V apparently stands for value, although HTC still packs plenty of tech into its low-end offering. Under a 3.7-inch WVGA display, the One V includes a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and the aforementioned imaging technology and Beats Audio. Strangely, the One V won’t include a microSD card slot to bolster its meagre 4GB of internal storage, although HTC hopes that customers will look past this by offering 25GB of space on cloud-service Dropbox — an offer available to anyone choosing a phone in the One range. The chassis of the One V is a unibody aluminium design, curved at the base like the HTC Legend was back in 2010.
All three phones run on the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google’s Android operating system, and all will take advantage of the latest iteration of HTC’s popular Sense user experience. HTC has reportedly slimmed back Sense for the latest release, removing some of the complex 3D animations in the current version to make it more memory efficient, while redesigning some other elements to integrate with Google’s Android aesthetics more so than in the past.
There has been no indication of HTC’s release schedule or pricing for these handsets in Australia as yet, although the company is promising to release the One X in the US on the AT&T network “in the next 60 days”.
