With only a few weeks to go before the HTC One starts showing up at retail outlets across the globe, it’s hard to image why anyone who’s interested in purchasing an HTC phone would not opt for the One. The device is certainly in a league of its own, but we do have to face the fact that some people simply won’t be able to afford the HTC One with pre-orders currently selling for £519.99.
With that in mind, our friends at Omio caught up with Phil Roberson, Head of HTC UK and Ireland and asked: will BlinkFeed and HTC’s new Ultrapixel technology come to low-end or mid-range phones?
“We look at services such as BlinkFeed, which we are looking to support across as many products as possible. It will take time, as we develop the new services, as that becomes more of a Sense experience. Sense is still really the core of what we are doing on Android, and BlinkFeed is sitting on top of the core of sense – and that will start to roll out as we go through the year. Wherever the technology is possible, we’re looking to take as much of the technology and enrich all of our customers.”
While BlinkFeed is purely enabled by software, HTC’s new Ultrapixel technology relies on a dedicated imagine chip and the quad-core processor used inside the HTC One.
“We’ve got dedicated silicon, in terms of the processing that comes off of the sensor. However, the Qualcomm chipset [used in the HTC One] does enable a lot of this to happen. The ability to take HD video and high-res images at the same time is powered by the quad-core on the device, as well. There will be certain technical challenges, but the tech does support the other elements of it which we can take to other parts of the portfolio.”
When asked if low-end smartphones would be getting the same camera functionality as the HTC One, Phil replied:
“A lot depends on what you define low-end, really. If you look at what we did on the One V [2012 entry-level One series phone]; that had the same image chip as we had on the One X. There is definitely the potential to take it into those spaces.”
Source: Omio
