Tuesday as MWC was the day of the Taiwanese brand HTC. The company announced several new phones, although none of the was an eyebrow-raiser. HTC, which claimed many markets with their outstanding smartphone, seems to be overtaken by others.
HTC launched 3 'normal' smartphone: the high-end Desire S and Incredible S, and the low/mid-end Wildfire S. None of them comes with a dualcore processor, much to the dissapointment to many fans of the successful brand. There was also a deal with Facebook, with HTC creating two dedicated Facebook phones, driven by Android: The Salsa and the ChaCha.
Performance
We got the chance to play around with the first three phones, the Facebook phones were still behind glass. All phones performed well, with the Desire S being the finest of them. This phone comes with a 3.7 inch screen, while the Incredible S has a 4 inch screen, both Super LCD. The Desire S comes with Android 2.4 Gingerbread, and is rather well designed, while the Incredible S feels quite cheap in our hands and has the previous version of Android, 2.2 Froyo. The Incredible S is said to come to stores for 519 euros, the Desire S costs 469 euros.
The Wildfire S is the successor to the Wildfire. It improves the most important drwabacks of its predecessor. The screen grows to 3.2 inch, the size of the Legend, and the resolution grows as well, making the image of the display sharper and brighter. The Three phones hit the market in Q2.
Facebook button
The Facebook phones ChaCha and Salsa have a physical hardware button with Facebook-logo. The HTC ChaCha is a candybar with full QWERTY keyboard, the Salsa is a touchscreen phone. It lights up when you encounter a possible Facebook-interaction, for instance when you take a picture. The button lights. Click it and the photo is send to Facebook immediately. These phone are expected in June and July.
Flyer Tablet
HTC also introduced a tablet, the Flyer, a tablet with a 7 inch screen and Android 2.4 Gingerbread, so there's no Honeycomb. Another disappointment from Taiwan this is, although the Flyer has good hardware with a 1,5 GHz processor.
Next version of Android
The rest of the news today came from Google. CEO Eric Schmidt announced that the new version of Android would support both smartphone and tablets. It means that the splitup in a smartphone and a tablet branch will end soon, probably with in 6 to 8 months.