If you happen to have Verizon for your wireless provider and rock the carrier’s variant of the HTC Droid DNA for your mobile weapon of choice, you know you have a more than capable handset in the palm of your hands. The handset is the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer’s entry to the phablet category and is said to be the smartphone that could offer the Samsung Galaxy Note II more than token competition and make the second generation Samsung phablet a serious run for its money. This despite the fact that the HTC Droid DNA comes with a slightly smaller 5.0-inch display compared to the gargantuan 5.5-inch panel of the Samsung Galaxy Note II.
The HTC Droid DNA was released back in November and when it hit the shelves, the HTC phablet ran Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for its operating system. Its operating system however is overlaid with HTC Sense 4+, the custom user interface of the Taiwanese manufacturer. But it looks like the attention being given by the smartphone-buying population to the HTC Droid DNA will be shifted over to the recently unveiled HTC One, the current flagship device of HTC.
Though some will see this as something of a negative especially that the HTC Droid DNA has only been in the shelves for just a couple of months, the arrival of the HTC One also brought a positive thing to the phablet in terms of its custom UI. For the uninitiated, the HTC One has Sense 5.0, the latest iteration of HTC’s custom UI overlaid atop its OS, and with this in play, the boys and girls of the developer communities have already managed to come up with a working port of Sense 5.0 for the HTC Droid DNA.
With this Sense 5.0 ROM running on the HTC Droid DNA, users of the HTC phablet will now have a chance to get a feel of the changes it brought to the HTC One. The developer of the port however is quick to caution us that this is still an alpha build and a thing or two are still not in working order such as HTC Zoe and MMS messages. All other features of the UI are already good to go however and those interested can already flash this onto their HTC Droid DNA handsets and use it as a daily driver for that matter.
As for the HTC Droid DNA, the handset boasts of very impressive components under the hood. It has its circuitry built around a QualComm APQ8064 SnapDragon S4 chipset which brings into play a quad-core 1.5 GHz Krait processor and a whopping 2GB of RAM. The storage space onboard the HTC Droid DNA is a bit meager though at just 16GB and only 11 of these are set aside for user content with no way to have this expanded. Display-wise, the HTC Droid DNA sports a 5.0-inch Super LCD3 panel with a 1920 x 1080 resolution while its dual-shooter configuration includes a rear 8MP shooter and a front 2.1MP video call and self-portrait snapper.
