A week after the CES 2017 event ended, HTC unveiled the new U series by launching the high-end HTC U Play and U Ultra smartphones. Now both the devices are made available for pre-orders in the UK while the shipping starts from March 1st. Apart from the company’s official website, the devices will be also sold through Carphone Warehouse and Clove. On the official website, the HTC U Play is listed in White, Black, and Blue color options, whereas the U Ultra will be available only in Black and Blue colors. The Carphone Warehouse is taking pre-orders for both the devices in White, Black, Pink, and Blue colors. Coming to the pricing, the HTC U Play is priced at £399 (approx $496 / Rs. 33,000) while the U Ultra comes with a price tag of £649 (approx $807 / Rs. 54,000).
Both the devices run on the latest Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with the HTC Sense skin laid on top. The company also introduced the new voice-based digital assistant called “Sense Companion” that works in the same way as the Google Assistant on Google Pixel smartphones. More than a competitor to Google Assistant, the Sense Companion also comes integrated with the services from Google Assistant. The devices come with a curved glass that has reflective nature, which the company calls as a Liquid Surface body. Another big change in the U series smartphones is the lacks of 3.5mm Audio port.
Talking about the specifications, the HTC U Play comes with a 5.2-inch Full HD display and is powered by MediaTek Helio P10 processor. It comes with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded technically upto 2TB. There is 16MP rear camera PDAF, OIS, f/2.0 aperture, and dual tone LED flash. The front camera also features a 16MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture and 77.9-degree wide-angle lens. Unlike the 16MP rear camera, the 16MP front camera comes with fixed focus. It is backed by a 2,500mAh battery and offers connectivity options like 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, NFC,
Bluetooth 4.2, and USB 2.0 Type-C port.
Coming to the HTC U Ultra, it comes with premium specifications which can justify the £649 price tag. As seen on the LG V10 and V20, the HTC U Ultra also features a secondary display placed on top of the 5.7-inch Quad HD display. The 64GB variant which is now available for pre-orders comes with Gorilla Glass 5 protection, and there is also a 128GB variant which sports a Sapphire Glass. Under the hood is the 64-bit Snapdragon 821 quad-core processor clocked at 2.15GHz and comes coupled with Adreno 530 GPU and 4GB of RAM. The HTC U Ultra shares the same 16MP front camera as on the HTC U Play.
On the rear, the device comes with a 12MP ‘ultra pixel 2’ camera with PDAF, laser autofocus, OIS, and f/1.8 aperture. It comes with BoomSound speaker for Hi-Fi audio output and also sports four microphones for better audio recording. With al these powerful specifications, the U Ultra comes with 3,000mAh battery that also supports Quick Charge 3.0 for fast charging. Along with the basic connectivity options, the U Ultra additionally comes with NFC and USB 3.1 Type-C port. We also expect both these devices to be soon made available in other markets as well. Stay tuned on Android Advices for more updates!