HTC has released its first software update for this year’s flagship device, the U Ultra, in India. The new update brings some important system enhancements, but the Indian roll out still misses the device’s major selling point, Sense Companion.
Mo Versi, Vice President of product management at HTC, broke this news on the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The tweet reads: “HTC U Ultra Owners! We have an MR out tonight that will improve the experience with bug fixes and additional features on the second screen!” The new software version is 1.15.400.12 and it’s a 598.06MB download.
However, there is no changelog for this update, but interestingly, the new update still misses the Sense Companion app, which the company had demonstrated in detail during the launch event. Further, the global roll out of the update mentions the fact that the HTC Sense Companion App is now pre-installed, but the Indian update shows nothing like this, which raises many eyebrows.
The virtual assistant app basically reminds you to charge the device if your commute is fast approaching, recommend a good restaurant, unlock the phone with user’s voice, at up to 2-meter range, warn you about the weather and more.Sadly, during our review period, it did no such thing. We had given all the permissions and answered all the opt-in suggestion cards it asked us once or twice in a while and that’s it. There were no suggestions from the app, which the company highlighted and yes it is really disappointing, unless we have missed out something critical.
Talking about some key specifications, the U Ultra sports a 5.7-inch QHD display with a screen Resolution of 2560×1440 pixels along with a secondary display of 2.0-inch with 160×1040 pixels resolution. The secondary display function is similar to what we have seen in LG V20 and displays notifications and other text-based information. Under the hood, the smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Processor coupled with Adreno 530 GPU. The device is backed by a 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, which is expandable.
On the camera front, the device sports a 12-megapixel rear camera with 1.55-micron pixels, f/1.8 aperture, hybrid Autofocus which include in-built phase detection autofocus and laser autofocus, OIS, dual tone LED flash. For the front, there is a 16-megapixel snapper with f/2.0 aperture, 28mm focal length. The device runs on Android 7.0 Nougat with HTC Sense on top of it and is juiced by 3000 mAh non-removable battery with Quick Charge 3.0. The smartphone support connectivity options like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, GPS and USB 3.1 Type-C. The smartphone also comes with company’s trademarked BoomSound technology coupled with Hi-Fi speaker and the device is Hi-Res audio certified.