Published in Mobiles

HTC unveils its new U Ultra smartphone

by on12 January 2017


5.7-incher with secondary display and SD821

After an endless streak of rumors, HTC has now unveiled its new U Ultra smartphone, a 5.7-incher with a secondary 2.05-inch screen, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 SoC and featuring the new Sense Companion assistant.

The big focus with the new U Ultra smartphone was on HTC's new Sense Companion, a new part of HTC's Sense interface and basically an automated assistant that learns from your actions and should help you in your life. The Sense Companion is "AI-enabled", which means it learns as you use it and gets better in time.

The HTC U Ultra measures 162.41x79.9x7.99, which means it is both larger and thicker compared to the iPhone 7 Plus and S7 Edge, but at 170g, it is also lighter than iPhone 7 Plus.

Specification-wise, the HTC U Ultra is built around a 5.7-inch Super LCD5 QHD 2560x1440 resolution display, which leaves it with 513 ppi of pixel density. Same as the LG V20, it also has a secondary 1040x160 2.05-inch screen at the top. Another novelty is the Sapphire glass protection, which is unfortunately limited to the 128GB exclusive version which should launch later this year, while the standard version will get Gorilla Glass 5 protection.

The heart of the HTC U Ultra is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 SoC with quad-core Kryo CPU part and Adreno 530 GPU. HTC also threw in 4GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of internal flash storage expandable via microSD card slot.

The main camera on the HTC U Ultra is a 12-megapixel, 26mm f/1.8 shooter with OIS, laser and phase autofocus and dual-LED flash. The front one is a 16-megapixel shooter that can grab 4-megapixel UltraPixel shots as well.

It appears that the all-metal unibody design of the HTC U Ultra forced HTC to go with a rather weak 3,000mAh battery, which supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 via USB Type-C port. It also lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack so sounds will be coming from that same port. The HTC U Ultra runs on Google's latest Android 7.0 Nougat.

As it was never called a flagship during the presentation, which suggests that we might yet see another "flagship" smartphone at MWC 2017, the HTC U Ultra certainly has a flagship price of US $749. It will be available in Brilliant Black, Cosmetic Pink, Ice White and Sapphire Blue color options and should ship in March 2017.

htc uultra 1

htc uultra 2

htc uultra 4

htc uultra 3

 

Last modified on 25 January 2017
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: