New Arrival HTC Butterfly review

HTC Butterfly review: The droid monarch

Going by sales in the past year alone, it's easy to forget that HTC still makes some of the best hardware in the smartphone game. Despite the fact that it was the first to release a smartphone with a dual-core Krait chipset, the first to launch a quad-core, and the first to put a fullHD display on a phone, the company's market share has dwindled over the last few quarters.

Indeed, while there wasn't much wrong with the HTC One S and One X, they both failed to realize their potential for various reasons. For one, the Taiwanese company got their marketing messed up of both the early summer releases and the Q4 holiday offerings. That's something they acknowledged and promised to work on in earnest in 2013.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support; 3G with HSPA; LTE (market dependent)

• 5" 16M-color 1080p Super LCD3 capacitive touchscreen display with 441ppi pixel density; Curved Gorilla Glass 2

• Android OS v4.1.1 Jelly Bean with Sense 4+ UI

• Quad-core 1.5 GHz Krait CPU, 2 GB RAM, Adreno 320 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset

• 8 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geo-tagging

• 1080p video recording @ 30fps, continuous autofocus and stereo sound

• 2.1 MP front-facing camera, 1080p video recording

• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA

• GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS

• 16GB of built-in storage; microSD card slot

• MHL-enabled microUSB port

• Bluetooth v4.0

• NFC

• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack

• Accelerometer and proximity sensor

• Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic

• Polycarbonate unibody

• Great audio quality and Beats audio enhancements

Main disadvantage

• Non user-replaceable battery

• Awkwardly placed and uncomfortable power key

• No shortcuts or connectivity toggles in notification area

• Uninspiring camera performance