 "HTC confirms next-gen Butterfly on the way")
HTC is not fazed by the delays in the delivery of its flagship, the HTC One, which will be hitting stores almost a month later than earlier promised. Instead, the company is working on the second-generation Butterfly, which will add another high-end handset to the company’s portfolio.
The Taiwanese company has said that another Butterfly is in the works to build on the growing consumer interest in phones with full HD displays. The HTC Butterfly ushered in the 1080p display trend when it was launched in Japan, and thanks to popular demand in other markets, the company launched the phone in the US as the Droid DNA on Verizon and eventually brought it to other regions, including India. The Butterfly is currently available for around Rs 46,000; it can be had for around Rs 37,000 in the grey market.
Benjamin Ho, HTC’s Chief Marketing Officer, said the 5-inch Butterfly was originally customised for carriers in Japan and has since been introduced in other markets. To meet increasing consumer demand in this segment, Ho says HTC will launch a successor under the same brand name.
Will a second-gen HTC Butterfly bring more success to the brand?
He didn’t reveal any other details of the next iteration, such as the announcement date or launch. “We have no plans for the time being to change the name of this series,” Ho was quoted as saying by Focus Taiwan.
HTC has gone on to update the Butterfly with the HTC One, which is in many ways an evolution, not least in the display department. The company claims the Butterfly has been seeing better-than-expected sales. To an extent, this is based on facts as the Butterfly was briefly the top-selling phone in Japan last year.
However, since that early success, HTC has not managed to keep up the production rate of the Butterfly, resulting in shortages. Ho says that Butterfly-related production problems have now been resolved, but there are still delays in the production of the HTC One.
Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest mobile service provider, was one of the carriers complaining about the lack of HTC Butterflys in their inventory due to the supply problems. The demand from Chungwa’s customers far exceeded the units HTC was shipping. Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone Telecommunications, which started selling the HTC Butterfly in late January, also warned potential Butterfly buyers about the long waiting lists for the phone.
It is not surprising that the Butterfly is a popular handset considering its specs. The phone is powered by the Snapdragon S4 Pro, which has four Krait cores clocked at 1.5GHz each.
The key specifications of the HTC Butterfly are:
- 5-inch Super LCD 3 1080p display with Corning Gorilla Glass 2 (441 ppi)
- LTE, 3G, HSPA+, GPRS, EDGE
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, NFC
- GPS with A-GPS support and GLONASS
- Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP
- 8-megapixel rear camera with LED flash, 2-megapixel front camera
- 16GB internal storage, expandable by up to 32GB via microSD
As for the specifications of the next-gen Butterfly, we have absolutely nothing to speculate on. What would you like to see in the HTC Butterfly 2?
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