So HTC held its event today, the day before Mobile World Congress officially kicks off in Barcelona, and announced three phones at once: the One X, the One S, and the One V. Im writing this at almost midnight because I couldnt stop refreshing liveblogs from Spain, which says something embarrassing about my priorities on a Sunday night.
Heres the thing that actually matters here, more than any spec sheet. HTC is finally admitting its naming scheme was a disaster. Think about the last two years of HTC phones. Desire, Desire S, Desire HD, Desire Z, Sensation, Sensation XE, Sensation XL, Wildfire, Wildfire S, Incredible S. I own a Desire HD and I still cant confidently tell you how its different from a regular Desire without looking it up. Every single one of these names sounds like a knockoff perfume. "One" is boring, sure, but boring is exactly what that lineup needed. Three tiers, three names, done. Im almost annoyed it took them this long to figure out something Apple and, honestly, even Nokia with its numbering has understood for years.
The actual phones
The One X is the flagship and its got a quad-core Tegra 3 chip and a 4.7 inch screen at 720p, which on paper sounds like massive overkill for a phone youre holding six inches from your face, but Ive learned not to bet against screen size creep at this point. Eighteen months ago a 4 inch screen felt huge and now that's basically the "small" tier. The One S is the mid-range one, thinner, still solid specs, aluminum body from what the early photos show. The One V is the budget model and honestly the one Im least interested in, it looks like a slightly restyled version of the old Legend, chin and all.
All three ship with Sense 4 on top of Ice Cream Sandwich, and HTC is making a big deal about how theyve stripped Sense down and made it lighter than previous versions. Ill believe that when I actually get one in my hands, because HTC has said some version of "we lightened Sense" at basically every launch since 2010 and it never quite feels lightweight to me. My Desire HD still chugs opening the camera app sometimes and thats with a single-core processor doing a fraction of the work these new chips will be asked to do.
The other thing everyones talking about is Beats Audio being baked into these phones, since HTC bought a chunk of Beats last year. Im going to be the guy who says this out loud: I think its mostly marketing. Nice EQ tuning and a red logo dont fix bad stock earbuds, and most people are going to plug in whatever cheap set came in the box anyway. Call me back when a phone actually ships with headphones worth using.
Nokia is apparently doing something with a 41 megapixel camera sensor tomorrow when MWC properly opens, which sounds almost fake when you type it out, so Ill wait and see the actual samples before I say anything about that one. Forty one megapixels on a phone sensor the size of my thumbnail raises a lot of questions about what "megapixel" even means in that context, but thats a post for another day, probably once actual photos start showing up online instead of press release numbers.
What Im actually curious about is pricing and carrier deals, because HTC has historically been rough about US availability timing. Their phones show up in the UK and across Europe months before they land stateside with some carrier-mangled name and half the features stripped for network reasons. If the One X shows up here as some AT&T-exclusive thing with a different model number by summer, none of us should be surprised.
Anyway. Its late, MWC proper starts tomorrow, and Im sure therell be a dozen more phone announcements by Wednesday that Ill have already half forgotten about by the weekend. Thats kind of how this week always goes.