HTC Reveals New Strategy at Mobile World Congress – The HTC One, Dropbox, and Sense 4.0

Posted 02/26/2012 at 6:25pm | by Justin Kerr

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HTC unveiled its 2012 Smartphone strategy at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the message was loud and clear. The EVO 4G, Sensation and many other devices did amazingly well in the market last year, but this scattershot approach failed to create the type of brand recognition Samsung has come to enjoy with the Galaxy S or, yes you know we have to say it, Apple and the iPhone. This year they plan to focus marketing efforts on a single lineup called the HTC One, which ironically enough, will ship in three variations.  

The HTC One X – High End – 32GB of Storage

The new flagship HTC One X is packing a ton of hardware, and will likely carry a price tag to match. The One X features a 4.7 inch 1280 x 720 Super LCD II display, quad-core NVidia Tegra 3 SoC running at 1.5GHZ, and support for 1080p encoding and decoding. The 9.27mm plastic body will house HSPA+ and LTE radios, along with 1GB of LPDDR2 memory. The 1.3MP front camera is capable of capturing video at 720p, however it pales in comparisons to the 8MP rear camera with a F2.0 lens assembly. HTC’s response to Airplay requires an HTC Media Link HD dock connected to the TV, but otherwise should provide 1:1 mirroring of everything on the phone’s display using a simple three finger swipe gesture.

The HTC One S – Midrange – 16GB of Storage

The HTC One S swaps out the Tegra 3 for a Qualcomm MSM8260A that is nearly identical to the Tegra 3 part, but without the LTE radio. The screen drops down to a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED PenTile display at 960 x 540, and the front camera also takes a hit dropping down to SD video only. The rear camera remains the same. 

The HTC One V – Entry – 4GB of Storage

The HTC One V is more or less a rebranded version of the HTC Legend which launched back in 2010, and rocks a measly 1GHz single-core processor. Optimizations to the camera  sound promising, but otherwise just check out reviews for the Legend.

Dropbox

iCloud and its puny 5GB of online storage might sound generous, but HTC’s newly announced partnership with Dropbox sounds much more interesting. The handset maker will offer any new HTC One customer a free Dropbox account with 25GB of storage absolutely free for the first two years. Dropbox doesn’t currently offer a pricing plan in this range, but doing a bit of back of the envelope math allows us to estimate an approximate value to you of $50 per year. Will Dropbox end up supporting the phone longer than HTC? Only time will tell.

Sense 4.0

HTC will still be skinning Android with its Sense UI, but they claim to have made many speed optimizations, in addition to increased support for Beats Audio, even in third party apps. Other improvements include redesigned camera utilities, along with an improved car experience which allows users to swipe between contacts, Google navigation, and music more effortlessly.

(Image Credit: TheVerge)