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Latest HTC mobile phone releases at the 2011 MWC in Barcelona
Latest HTC mobile phone releases.
HTC is a company that has had an excellent 2010, now ranked second as a producer of hardware in the mobile space behind only the mighty Apple. They brought an exciting lineup of devices to this year`s Mobile World Congress with five new smart phones and their first tablet device, the Flyer. Two of their phones introduced their new concept of the `Facebook` button for the first time, the new ChaCha and Salsa models while the other three are all updates to existing phones, the Desire S, Incredible S and Wildfire S. All of the devices are based on ARM processing cores and are slated for release in the second quarter of 2011.
The top end devices were their two updates to the Desire and Incredible S with S standing for Sense. The Desire seems a little disappointingly off the pace in hardware terms sporting only, by 2011 standards, a single core clocked at 1 GHz, compared to the dual core offerings coming out for other top end smart phones such as the Galaxy S II this seems underpowered. It is reflected by a lower price with the Desire S available at around £420 compared to the Galaxy S II`s £550 price tag. The new display is a 480 by 800 pixel, 3.7 inch screen and the phone itself is considerably thinner than the previous Desire. Its camera remains unchanged at five megapixels but it now records in up to 720p HD and the RAM was boosted to seven-hundred and eight megs with hard storage up to one gig. There is far more to see that`s new on the software side with Android 2.3 included along with HTC`s Sense UI.
The Incredible is the top of the line phone from HTC with a four inch screen, an eight megapixel camera with the ability to take 720p movies and LED flashes. Like the Desire its processor is only a single core at one gigahertz, also like the Desire it has more RAM than its predecessor and an upgrade to the graphics.
HTC`s Wildfire brings up the rear as the smallest handset with a 3.2 inch screen with an increased resolution over the older model and a fairly limited 600 MHz processing core along with 512 MB of RAM.
The two Facebook phones, the ChaCha and Salsa are aimed at younger users to encourage them to move from a more basic mobile phone to a smartphone with the Facebook button aimed squarely at attracting their attention. Given the flexibility of the Android interface to add widgets and shortcuts for apps such as Facebook this seems very niche. The ChaCha is a rare beast these days by having a physical QWERTY keyboard that`s arranged in a portrait manner below the screen in a similar way to many of RIM`s Blackberry devices.
Only time will tell how these new devices stack up against the competition such as the rumoured new Apple iphone, the iPhone 5. This will be an exciting year for HTC as they attempt to consolidate their lead over the other non-Apple manufacturers such as Samsung while making some headway into Apple`s huge lead. With Apple soaking up many of the component suppliers over the next year it may be hard for them to meet the production volumes necessary to do this.