The first day of Spring in the United States was supposed to bring seasonably warm temperatures. That prediction was according to the soothsaying Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who somehow has become the announcer of an early or late Spring each year in the US. Incorrect more occasionally than he is right, he was wrong once again in 2013. But while winter temperatures continued to roll across the US, online retailer Amazon was planning to get the annual Spring smartphone discount parade started early.
This time each year, online and off-line mobile handset marketers begin to discount their current handsets, whether they are best-sellers or not. This is because Spring and Summer are usually home to multiple smartphone releases which all promise to deliver the next big thing in the mobile marketplace. Ahead of the release of the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Apple iPhone 5S, Amazon substantially discounted the powerful HTC Droid DNA, a 4G Android smartphone running on the Verizon Wireless network in the United States.
That phone can be had for around $49 on contract currently, and is available at the Amazon Wireless store online. Not a bad discount price for a phone which delivers what is arguably the highest pixel density of any smartphone, and has only been around since late November of last year. The handset is run by the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system and HTC Sense UI, and typical capacitive, multitouch gestures are used for navigation. HTC has included the sound enhancement package of Beats Audio, delivering “bigger and better sound” through dedicated speaker and headset amplifiers.
But without a doubt, the most noticeable feature on the phone is the large 5.0 inch Full HD screen that offers 441 pixels over each inch of display space. Most high-end handset displays now offer at least 300 pixels per inch, and that designation delivers an extremely resolute picture. The HTC Droid DNA 4G Android smartphone, to compare apples to apples, offers a full 33% improvement over popular phones like the Galaxy S III (306 ppi) and Apple iPhone 5 (326 ppi) where pixel density is concerned.
HTC designed the Droid DNA 4G to be slim and light, and the handset weighs just 4.87 ounces (138 g), measuring 0.38 inches (9.73 mm) in thickness. The 5.0 inch ImageChip ISP S-LCD 3 display offers a high-end resolution of 1,080 x 1,920 pixels (1,080P), and employs more than 16 million separate colors to render visuals while protected by a layer of scratch resistant Gorilla Glass. A quad core 1.5 GHz CPU joins 2.0 GB of RAM memory in the handset’s hardware package, and the rear facing 8.0 megapixel camcorder is capable of simultaneous HD video and image capture, recording video in 1,080P HD resolution.
