Rumors have been confirmed that smartphone manufacturer HTC is working on the follow-up to the successful Droid DNA 4G Android smartphone. HTC Chief Marketing Officer Ben Ho told reporters on Monday that HTC would launch a second generation Droid DNA 4G smartphone, tentatively named the Butterfly. Obviously at this stage no release date or specification was mentioned, but a late 2013 or early 2014 launch would make sense. The announcement was reported by the Focus Taiwan news site. The Droid DNA was recently spotted at the Amazon Wireless store online with a retail price tag of $49 on contract, a substantial reduction to recent pricing.
The HTC Droid DNA 4G Android smartphone was released in November of last year, and runs on the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system. In a very sleek design, the handset offers red side grills, a seamless laminated screen and a slim, light but tough polycarbonate unibody. The phone is finished in an ultra-matte design, and delivers wireless charging and NFC access out-of-the-box. This was the handset which was created to compete directly with the two best-selling smartphones on the planet, the Samsung Galaxy S III and Apple iPhone 5.
The central point of the HTC Droid DNA is the large 5.0 inch 1,080P display, which delivers one of the largest pixel densities of any smartphone ever created. At 441 pixels per inch, the HTC Droid DNA 4G provides a resolution that is more than 30% better than the S III and iPhone 5, and the 5.0 inch screen bests the 4.8 inch offering from the Samsung Galaxy S III, as well as the 4.0 inch display found on the iPhone 5. The handset is slim at 0.3 inches (9.73 mm) and light for such a large phone at 4.87 ounces (138 g).
The large 5.0 inch ImageChip ISP S-LCD 3 display receives a protective layer of scratch resistant glass, and offers more than 16 million individual colors. Overall resolution on the Droid DNA runs 1,080 x 1,020 pixels, and standard capacitive, multitouch gestures are used for navigation. Talk time runs roughly 50% better than the industry average at 12.6 hours, and that full battery charge also provides up to 14.6 days of standby juice. The Snapdragon quad core central processor has been clocked at 1.5 GHz, and 2.0 GB of RAM memory is on board.
The system chip powering the handset is a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 model, and the GPU is an Adreno 320 chip. 16 GB of onboard storage is present as well. The 8.0 megapixel on the back of the handset is capable of simultaneously capturing your video and snapshot memories in high resolution, and video is recorded in 1,080P HD resolution. A front facing chat cam of 2.1 megapixels is also on board, and a YouTube video player joins the above-mentioned Beats Audio in the handset’s multimedia package.
