At a New York press event today, HTC announced its newest flagship phone, the HTC One. A number of innovative new features, including BlinkFeed, Zoe, and the UltraPixel Camera, may push it into competition with some of the hottest smart phones on the market today.
Among other news for this phone, the company touted a new feature called BlinkFeed, which pushes "personally relevant information" from sources you select to the home screen of the One.
The BlinkFeed interface is reminiscent of Windows 8 Phone's live-tile interface. Sources must be registered content partners; the company said that so far, 1,400 content partners are on board, including the Huffington Post, Moviefone, Flickr, the Associated Press, and ESPN. With the latter, for example, you can select it as a feed and customize it to push news for your favorite teams and sports.
Another new feature called HTC Zoe impressed us at a demo during the event today: It lets you shoot video and still photos simultaneously. Once you're done, you can turn the footage into a montage of video and stills, complete with timed transitions and music—with one button press.
The One phone also features the HTC UltraPixel Camera, which our camera expert Terry Sullivan speculated about last week. The UltraPixel sensor is a BSI (back-illuminated sensor) that HTC claims can capture "300 percent more light than traditional smartphone camera sensors," which promises very good low-light performance. And the One has an f2.0 aperture and 28 mm lens.
For audio, the One has HTC BoomSound: two front-facing stereo speakers with a dedicated amplifier and Beats Audio integration. HTC claims this will provide a better listening experience for streamed content, as well as improved call quality.
The HTC One also sports an all-metal chassis, 4.7-inch display with full-HD 1080p resolution, a powerful quad-core processor (Snapdragon 600), and Android 4.1.2 (Jellybean). It will ship in late March and be available on AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the U.S. We look forward to getting the HTC One into our labs and testing these new features and claims.
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