HTC Butterfly 2 and J Butterfly HTL23 officially unveiled

The HTC J Butterfly was announced a few weeks back, but HTC’s Peter Chou took center stage today in Japan to officially unveil the new phone along with the HTC Butterfly 2. The two phones are a slight variation on the HTC One (M8), wrapped inside a plastic shell with an IP57 rating (achieved without any port flaps).

Besides a few network, internal storage option and weight differences, the HTC Butterfly 2 and J Butterfly are the same phone. Both devices feature a quad-core 2.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage (the Butterfly 2 also has a 16GB option), 128GB capacity microSD card clot, 5-inch 1080p display, NFC, GPS and a 2,700 mAh battery. Like the HTC One (M8), the J Butterfly and Butterfly 2 are equipped with a 5 megapixel front-facing camera, but the DuoCamera on the back of both phones has been “upgraded” with a 13 megapixel sensor.

HTC has also worked to improve the BoomSound audio experience with of the HTC J Butterfly and Butterfly 2 by including the HARMAN “LiveStage™ signal processing technology and bundling a pair of JBL in-ear-headphones which were designed exclusively for the phone. And if that wasn’t enough, HTC announced that NOGIZAKA 46 would be the official ambassadors of the HTC J Butterfly in Japan.

“Our consumers always pursue perfection. Therefore, we chose the partner that we know will offer the best smartphones in the market. Since the HTC J series was released, it has become the most popular phone in our product portfolio.” – Takashi Tanaka, President, KDDI

The HTC J Butterfly and HTC Butterfly will go on sale in early September. Taiwan will be the first market to get the HTC Butterfly 2 on September 2nd with Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand expected to get the phone later in the month. KDDI isn’t quite ready to announce when the HTC J Butterfly will go on sale in Japan, but we suspect NOGIZAKA 46 will be making a massive media push once the date is made available.