After announcing it in the United States last month and making it up for pre-order in the UK earlier this month, seems like HTC is all set to launch its first of the six-seven smartphones it is expected to launch in India. The Taiwenese giant has already started sending out media invites for the event which is set to happen on 21st February in New Delhi. The invite reads ‘for U #HTC U Ultra’ which makes us to think that the even will indeed host the launch of HTC’s new smartphone, U Ultra.
For the specs, 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 functions similar to what we have seen in LG V20 in the past. Under the hood, the smartphone is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 Processor coupled with Adreno 530 GPU. The device is backed by 4GB of RAM and comes in two storage option namely 64GB and 128 GB, with expandable storage option.
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. Further, The company has ditched the 3.5mm Audio Jack in favour of USB-C connector and a new feature known as HTC USonic, which analyzes your inner ears with a sonar-like pulse to enhance the overall listening experience.
With the U series, HTC has introduced its own smart personal assistant with the name ‘Sense Companion’. For instance, it will remind you to charge the device if your commute is fast approaching, recommend a good restaurant, unlock the phone with user voice, at up to 2-meter range, warn you about the weather and more.
Interestingly, a report recently confirmed that HTC will cut back on entry level smartphones and focus more on premium and midrange smartphones for higher margin. Now though the media invite doesn’t reveal anything about the price, it will be interesting to see how the U Ultra is priced for the Indian market. Given the fierce competition in all kinds of segment combined with HTC’s latest strategy of higher margin smartphones, the smartphone will probably come with a premium price tag. Also the omission of 3.5 mm Headphone jack has started to be more prominent in HTC smartphones now with other manufacturers soon to follow.