The brand new HTC One has been released and is available just about everywhere, but if you wanted the new version of the smartphone with a stock Android experience, you were out of luck before this month. The HTC One Google Play Edition was expected to be released at some point, but now according to reports, that release date will be the 15th of April. That means you will be able to buy the brand new HTC One with stock Android operating system from the Google Play Store, but you will be paying full retail price for it.
The Google Play Edition of smartphones have been hitting the market for a few years now and it is really just giving smartphones users that chance to skip using the sometimes confusion user interfaces that come on smartphones like LG, HTC and Samsung. The only catch is that you are paying full price for the phone, but it will come unlocked and free to take to just about any mobile carrier in the country. Besides knowing when the HTC One (M8) will be available, it make some wonder why they will not be seeing the Samsung Galaxy S5 version just as quickly.
As of right now there has not been one work spoken about the Samsung version, but it is expected sometime this month. The HTC One Google Play Edition will come running stock “vanilla” version of Android and it will not have any option to be using the new HTC Sense 6.0 user interface that the company uses to overlay the stock Android experience giving users some additional features. As far as all of the other specs for the phone, they will remain exactly the same as the original.
Google has updated the Google Play Store listing to indicate that the HTC One (M8) will be shipping on the 15th and that is just five days after the phone will be shipping on all of the other major mobile carriers in the United States. The Google Play Edition started with the Galaxy S4 last year and shortly after it saw much success through the Google Play Store, companies like HTC, LG, Sony and Motorola all followed suit and offered the same option to users that wanted to opt-out of the user interface experience and stick with stock Android.
