Back in 2011, HTC head honcho Peter Chou promised that all future HTC devices will have unlockable bootloaders via the HTCDev website. Sad to say, that is no longer the case at the moment but the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer found a way to at least give those interested in tinkering with HTC devices a chance to do so – by releasing a Developer Edition of its flagship devices. The latest HTC handset to get the Developer treatment is the recently unveiled HTC One flagship.
HTC recently announced that it will be releasing a Developer Edition of the HTC One which will come with an unlocked bootloader and SIM. The unlocked nature of its SIM is already expected since the handset will be sold without a contract but the unlocked bootloader of the handset means that developers and power users will have easy access to the core functionalities of the HTC One. In short, all the numerous personalization and customization options offered by the Android ecosystem can easily be accessed with the HTC One Developer Edition.
As for its unlocked SIM, HTC announced that the radio frequencies of the HTC One Developer Edition are those most often used in US shores and these are the following:
- HSPA/WCDMA: 850/1900/2100 MHz
- GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
- LTE: 700/850/AWS/1900 MHz (US)
In addition to that, HTC also confirmed that the HTC One Developer Edition will hit US shelves in limited quantities as soon as the carrier-branded variants of the regular HTC One have already been released. No specific time frame has been mentioned so far as to when this variant of the HTC One will be made available for public consumption but those interested in getting their hands on the HTC One Developer Edition will be forced to shell out $649 for the handset.
As for the innards of the HTC One Developer Edition, there is not much difference between the components found under the hood of this version of the handset compared to the regular HTC One flagship so expect the same fire-breathing internals in it. As for the regular HTC One handset, several US carriers have already confirmed that they will be releasing their respective variants of the HTC superphone but the specifics of when these variants will hit the shelves haven’t been nailed yet.
Under the hood, the operation of the HTC One Is powered by its QualComm APQ8064T SnapDragon 600 chipset and the computing muscle required by the handset is generated by its 1.7 GHz Krait 300 processor and 2GB of RAM. The handset will be released in a 32GB and a 64GB edition in terms of storage capacity but this is all you get because the HTC One doesn’t pack support for memory expansion. As for its display, the HTC One sports a 4.7-inch Super LCD3 panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels while its camera department boasts of a rear 4MP Ultrapixel shooter and a front 2.1MP snapper.
