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New HTC One Flagship Phone Gets Pictured, As A Picture Reportedly Taken With Its Camera Leaks
HTC’s new flagship phone is likely called the HTC One, and will probably debut later this month ahead of MWC, and now we have an image of what looks like a render of shipping hardware courtesy of EvLeaks. The HTC One image published today by the well-regarded source of pre-release Android info resembles earlier images but with an active home screen. This weekend also saw an image posted to Flickr with “HTC One” listed in its EXIF data, contributing to speculation that that is indeed what the phone will be called.
The HTC One image posted today potentially reveals a bit more about Sense 5.0, which in earlier leaks looked to have borrowed some design influences from Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile OS in that it adopted a grid-style interface. Judging by the image posted by EvLeaks, that could be populated by content from social networks, as the photos on the homescreen seem to originate from Facebook contacts. Other noteworthy features include only the presence of a back and home button on the device bezel – curious both because Android moved to soft keys only on stock devices with the latest update, and because it lacks an app switcher button.
That could be a feature particular to Sense, but I wonder whether it’ll be compensated for somehow in the OS itself. Either way, the hardware looks solid; it’s somewhat of a departure for HTC, with what look like chamfered edges that might awaken feelings of familiarity in iPhone 5 owners, and top and bottom panels that look somewhat similar to those on BlackBerry’s new Z10 smartphone. But the speaker grills and screen size look like they could set this far enough apart to keep it unique, despite similarities with other OEM hardware.
In related news, this photo posted to Flickr supposedly comes from a camera in an “HTC One” device, boast a 2.0 aperture and coming in at around 4.1 megapixels, which is in keeping with reports that the HTC One will have a camera that uses three stacked 4 megapixel sensors to deliver better sharpness, dynamic range and depth of color. The image does indeed deliver a pretty good rendering of text for the in-focus area, and fairly low amounts of noise considering that it looks to have been taken in a low-light environment.
The Ultrapixel camera could be one of the features that takes center stage at HTC’s February 19 event in NYC. We’ll be on the ground live to cover the unveiling as it happens next week, so we don’t have long to wait to find for sure out what’s fact and what’s fiction.
