HTC One S, headed to T-Mobile, and One V launch in Barcelona
HTC says its One Series smartphones, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona this week, have something for everyone among its One X, One S and One V.
The One X, which we wrote about on Monday, sits at the top of the heap with a massive 4.7-inch, 1,280 x 720-pixel-resolution touch screen and a quad-core processor outside of the U.S. -- in America, the One X will get a dual-core processor and be exclusive to AT&T.
The One S sits in the middle of the pack and will be sold by T-Mobile in the U.S. But the One S won’t be a slouch by any means. It will share the same 1.5-gigahertz dual-core processor as the American version of the One X, as well as packing the same 1 gigabyte of RAM.
The screen on the One S is smaller but still big, with a 4.3-inch display sporting a lesser 960 x 540 resolution. Whereas the One X will ship with 32-gigabytes of storage, the One S will feature 16 gigabytes of storage.
Thankfully, the styling of the One S and One X are similar, with a metal unibody, rounded edges and clean lines throughout. Above the display are pinholes for the phone’s speaker and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chatting. On back of both phones is an 8-megapixel/1080p camera as well.
The One S will be HTC’s thinnest phone so far, coming in at 7.9-millimeters (or 0.31 inches) thick, and its unibody will be finished in a new “ultra-matte black ceramic metal surface” that is the result of an oxidation process “originally developed for use in satellites,” the phone maker said in a statement.
The treatment allows the unibody to be “four times harder than anodized aluminum” and have a light-to-dark gradient fade as well, HTC said, noting that it had patented the gradient process.
The One S will be available in a regular, nongradient black as well.
The One V, sitting at the bottom rung of the lineup, is less exciting and very familiar territory for HTC as it’s essentially a newer version of the HTC Legend, which made its debut back in 2010. The kicked-out chin of the Legend is still around in the One V.
The smallest of the bunch, the One V has a 3.7-inch screen with an 800×480 resolution, a 1-gigahertz single-core processor, 512-megabytes of RAM and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and just 4-gigabytes of storage included, though there is a micro SD card slot for storage expansion.
HTC hasn’t yet said which carriers would be selling the One V or revealed pricing or firm release dates for any of the One Series phones.
Across the three handsets there are a couple common features worth noting in the camera, audio and software side of things.
All three phones will run Google’s Android Ice Cream Sandwich operating system topped with HTC’s Sense 4.0 user interface -- Ice Cream Sandwich being the latest version of Android available.
The Taiwanese electronics maker is touting the One Series as ushering in a camera technology that will offer a new standard for smartphones with feature that allows users to shoot video and photos at the same time.
And each One Series handset features Beats Audio tuning, which HTC says will allow its phones in music-player mode to produce fuller, more “authentic”-sounding music. We’ll have to reserve judgment until we can get our hands on some review units, but the lineup does look promising.
What do you think? Does HTC have a phone for you in the One Series or are you looking elsewhere? Sound off in the comments below.
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