HTC Salsa
HTC had their big press event at MWC today, and they certainly brought plenty of products to please Android fans worldwide. Not only did HTC officially unveil the two handsets with dedicated Facebook buttons that we saw yesterday, we also got to finally see the company's entry into the tablet market as well as a trio of good ol' fashioned Android smartphones. There's a lot of information to digest here, so let's break it down bullet-point style:
HTC certainly brought the heat with them to Barcelona today, and it's nice to see them push out products that run the gamut of Android device styles. They've got a low-end handset with the Wildfire S, a nice higher-end phone with the Incredible S, a tablet, and a couple of Facebook-centric phones for all of us social networking addicts. There wasn't much in the way of U.S. launch info outside of the Salsa and ChaCha, but I'm sure we'll be seeing most of these handsets hitting the U.S. at some point. I'm particularly excited for the Incredible S, which I'm sure we'll be see on Verizon soon. HTC made some great updates with the new Incredible, and I'm glad to see that they bumped up the display without going too big. The lack of Honeycomb and a dual-core CPU in the Flyer is kind of a bummer, but I'm sure we'll see HTC include those specs in a tablet in the near future. So, now that HTC has outed a plethora of new Android-powered devices, what do you all think? Has any of them jumped to the top of your must-have list?
HTC ChaCha
HTC Incredible S
HTC Desire S
HTC Wildfire S
HTC Flyer
HTC UNVEILS TWO SOCIAL PHONES WITH ONE-TOUCH FACEBOOK® ACCESS
HTC raises the bar for mobile social phones with HTC ChaChaTM and HTC SalsaTM
BARCELONA, SPAIN – Mobile World Congress – February 15, 2011 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today announced two new phones built entirely to be social, combining the simplicity, ease-of-use and depth of HTC SenseTM with the power and connectivity of Facebook®. As part of an extended portfolio of six new HTC Sense-based devices being unveiled at Mobile World Congress, HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa feature a dedicated Facebook® button for one-touch access to the key functions of the Facebook service that are integrated throughout the HTC Sense experience.
"HTC has always understood that different people want different things and the new HTC ChaCha and Salsa offer special new ways to experience Facebook on a mobile device," said Peter Chou, CEO of HTC Corporation. "With more than 500 million active users worldwide, Facebook has become synonymous with the social web and we wanted to create the ultimate socially connected phones with mass market appeal."
"We have worked closely with HTC for several years on bringing Facebook to their devices and HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa are the next stage," said Henri Moissinac, Head of Mobile Business for Facebook. "HTC has brought Facebook to these two new devices in an innovative way enabling people to connect and share easily whenever they want, wherever they are."
The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook. With a single press of the button, you can update your status, upload a photo, share a Website, post what song you are listening to, 'check in' to a location and more. For example, you can take a photograph of friends on your phone and upload it instantly to Facebook by simply pressing the button. Or let your friends know what song you're listening to by pressing the button while listening to music on the phone. The track is automatically identified and shared on Facebook.
The new devices feature Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, the latest version, and use the latest iteration of HTC Sense to integrate Facebook throughout the HTC Sense experience. When you make a phone call, the dialer screen displays your friend's latest status and photos, and even tells you if their birthday is approaching. The same updates are also displayed when you receive a call from a Facebook friend. You can also use your phone's existing contacts to help you connect with them on Facebook or personalize your handset further with a number of new, Facebook-branded widgets.
The HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa smartphones make it simple to stay in touch with your friends using Facebook Chat and Messages on your phone. Your Facebook messages and conversations are integrated within your phone and appear within your text and email inboxes alongside your regular conversations.
Stay connected with the smartphone for the Facebook generation – HTC ChaCha
The HTC ChaCha smartphone is designed to provide a seamless, social experience by enabling you to stay in touch with your friends anytime, anywhere. The unique tilt design shapes the display and physical QWERTY keyboard so it is easy to view and comfortable to type. Capture special moments in crisp, High-Definition detail or video chat with your friends using the dual cameras, including a 5-megapixel color camera with auto focus and LED flash and a VGA front-facing camera. The ChaCha smartphone also brings the Internet to your fingertips with a 2.6-inch, 480 x 320 resolution landscape touch screen.
Your Facebook friends never felt closer – HTC Salsa
Boasting the same deep Facebook integration as the HTC ChaCha smartphone, the HTC Salsa smartphone provides a fast, high-performance smartphone experience. Capture the moment in high-resolution stills or video with the 5-megapixel camera and immediately share it with friends on the generous 3.4-inch, 480 x 320 resolution touch display. Upload your photos to Facebook at the touch of a button. For face-to-face conversations on the move, the VGA forward-facing camera enables high-quality video calling.
Availability
The HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa smartphones will be available to customers across major European and Asian markets during Q2 2011. In the United States, AT&T and HTC are exclusively bringing this unique user experience to market later this year.
HTC LAUNCHES THREE NEW SMARTPHONES WITH HTC SENSE™
HTC Desire S, HTC Wildfire S™ and HTC Incredible S™ deliver premium style, power and speed
BARCELONA, SPAIN – Mobile World Congress – February 15, 2011 – HTC Corporation, a global leader in mobile innovation and design, today unveiled three new versions of its most popular and advanced smartphones – HTC Desire S, HTC Wildfire S and HTC Incredible S. The new smartphones continue HTC's commitment to expanding the market for advanced smartphones while providing distinct choices in design, power and value. Each phone also includes HTC Sense, HTC's unique customer-focused user experience that puts people at the center by making phones work in a more simple and natural way.
"HTC developed the HTC Sense experience to bring cutting-edge innovation to our customers in simple and natural ways that just make sense - this is what HTC Desire S, HTC Wildfire S and HTC Incredible S represent best," said Peter Chou, CEO of HTC Corporation. "These new phones offer an exhilarating mix of style, innovation and features that extend people's mobile experience in ways that feel personal and completely original."
HTC Desire S
As a successor to the popular and award-winning HTC Desire, the new HTC Desire S blends stunning design with power and speed. Inspired by the HTC Legend™ smartphone's aluminium design, the HTC Desire S is sculpted out of a single block of aluminum making it feel solid and natural in your hand. With Qualcomm's new 1GHz Snapdragon™ MSM8255 processor, the HTC Desire S offers snappy performance and power. It offers dual front and back cameras, High-Definition video recording and the 3.7-inch WVGA display presents multimedia content brilliantly.
HTC Wildfire S
Building on the popularity of the HTC Wildfire™ smartphone, the HTC Wildfire S smartphone is an affordable, compact and playful device that packs a powerful smartphone experience. It enables people to maintain and build connections and friendships through popular sites like Facebook®, as well as through voice and text messaging. You can instantly tag your friends in photos before posting them on Facebook, or share your latest discoveries from the Android™ Market at the touch of a button.
HTC Wildfire S is one of HTC's smallest phones ever – measuring just 10.13cm long and 5.94cm wide – and boasts a distinctive 3.2 inch, HVGA display.
Celebrate your individuality and choose from a wide variety of colors including black, purple and white. The phone's home screen is fully customizable with your favorite apps, widgets and content, while a 5-megapixel color camera with auto focus, expandable microSD™ memory and support for a variety of audio and video formats make a great all-around multimedia device that slips easily into any pocket.
HTC Incredible S
The alluring HTC Incredible S smartphone combines cutting-edge design with a premium mobile experience for those who dare to be different. Showing what can be achieved when engineers and designers work together to raise the bar for mobile phone design, the HTC Incredible S smartphone features a stunning, contoured body that highlights the internal hardware components of the device. Capturing and viewing video in crystal clear High-Definition has never been so easy and a bright 4-inch WVGA Super LCD display and stereo surround sound bring a vibrant cinematic experience to the palm of your hand.
HTC Incredible S also takes high quality pictures with its 8-megapixel camera with dual flash, and it easily enables videos, photos and music to be shared from the handset direct to a TV using DLNA® technology. Thanks to the HTC Incredible S's front facing camera and video call functionality, users will constantly be able to chat with their friends face-to-face.
Availability
The HTC Desire S, HTC Wildfire S and HTC Incredible S smartphones, will be broadly available to customers across major European and Asian markets during Q2 2011.
HTC Unveils HTC FLYER™, The First Tablet
With HTC SENSE™
Aluminum unibody design with touch and pen interaction make HTC Flyer unique
First tablet with HTC Watch™ video service, HTC Scribe™ Technology
and OnLive® cloud gaming
BARCELONA, SPAIN – Mobile World Congress – February 15, 2011 – HTC, a global leader in mobile innovation and design, today announced its first tablet, the HTC FlyerTM. HTC Flyer blends HTC’s trademark design language with an all-new HTC Sense user experience that has been reimagined for the tablets. Using an intuitive and innovative approach to tablets, HTC Flyer combines natural touch and pen interaction. HTC also announced HTC Watch, a new connected video service that will debut on HTC Flyer tablet, and will collaborate with OnLive, Inc. to launch the first cloud-based mobile gaming service on a tablet.
“Clearly, smartphones have transformed our lives but as we observed how people use smartphones, computers and other technologies, we saw an opportunity to create a tablet experience that is different, more personal and productive,” said Peter Chou, CEO of HTC Corporation. “We are progressing down a path as an industry when people will no longer be in a single device paradigm, but have multiple wireless devices for different needs; this is the direction we are moving.”
Encased in a sleek aluminum unibody, the HTC Flyer tablet exudes the iconic style and build quality HTC is known for. It is also ultra-light, weighing as little as a paperback book, and compact enough to fit in a jacket pocket only. With a seven-inch display, lightning fast 1.5Ghz processor and high-speed HSPA+ wireless capabilities, the HTC Flyer tablet is perfect for those who have been waiting for a tablet that is both compact and powerful.
HTC Sense for Tablet
HTC Sense revolutionized smartphones by placing the person at the center of the experience. HTC Flyer’s tablet-focused HTC Sense experience focuses on surprising and delighting people with its gorgeous 3D home screen. A unique carousel of widgets puts a user’s most important content and information at the visual center of the experience. The HTC Flyer tablet also offers uncompromised Web browsing with Flash 10 and HTML 5.
HTC Scribe Technology
Touch interaction lights up the HTC Flyer tablet experience, but it also offers a groundbreaking pen experience. With the new HTC Scribe Technology on the HTC Flyer tablet, people can rediscover the natural act of writing. HTC Scribe Technology introduces a wave of integrated digital ink innovations that make it easy and natural to take notes, sign contracts, draw pictures, or even write on a web page or photo.
HTC Scribe Technology on the HTC Flyer tablet transforms traditional note-taking into smart note-taking by integrating natural onscreen writing with thoughtful and integrated innovations. A feature called Timemark enables you to capture the audio of a meeting in line with your written notes, so tapping on a word in your notes instantly takes you to that exact place in time in the audio recording of the meeting. Notes are also integrated with the calendar so when there is an appointment reminder you are automatically prompted with an opportunity to begin a new note or in the case of recurring meetings, to continue where the last meeting left off. In an industry first, the HTC Flyer tablet also features built-in synchronization with Evernote?, the world-leading notes application and service.
Streaming Mobile Movies with HTC Watch
The HTC Flyer tablet premieres HTC Watch, HTC’s new video download service. The HTC Watch service enables low-cost on-demand progressive downloading of hundreds of High-Definition movies from major studios. The intuitive, natural design of the HTC Watch service makes it easy to find the latest movie and video content, while advanced technology on the back-end enables instant playback over the HTC Flyer tablet’s high-speed wireless connection.
Mobile Cloud Gaming with OnLive
HTC takes mobile gaming to an entirely new level by being the first mobile device in the world to integrate OnLive Inc.’s revolutionary cloud-based gaming service. OnLive is leading in the home gaming market by letting people play top video games on their televisions and computers without the need to buy expensive gaming hardware or software. When integrated fully, the OnLive service will enable customers to pipe the OnLive service through the HTC Flyer tablet’s broadband wireless to their television sets, or let them play directly on the tablet. When integrated on the HTC Flyer tablet, people can play a variety of games, including hits like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood™, NBA 2K11 and Lego Harry Potter™.
Availability
HTC Flyer will be available to customers globally during Q2 2011.
Via Engadget (1), (2), (3)
