Today we’ll be taking a brief look at the HTC Butterfly S. This is one of the newest and strongest smartphones you can get your hands on in this current market. This phone has a TON of interesting features on it and is capable of doing more than a couple of things. It looks great, it functions great and offers a lot of unique and interesting features. What it asks for in return is money – lots of it. I’m pretty sad to say this, but, the fact remains that this isn’t the cheapest of phones ( far from that, really ).
There’s quite a mouthful to be said about the design and aspect of this device, but not a whole lot of bad things are included in that sentence. The HTC Butterfly S is a GREAT looking phone with a lot of work put into the details ( also I’m a BIG fan of Red and Black combinations, and this phone has them and quite well, might I add ). I won’t be spoiling or giving away any more info about the HTC Butterfly S – if you want to know more, keep reading and you won’t regret it.
SUMMARY
There are a few questions you might like answered in this question, rather than just telling you stuff I’d normally reveal in each separate section. First off: is the phone any good? Well, while this may not be a CHEAP smartphone, it certainly is a good one. We’ve established that the phone is a good one, but is it worth the huge price demanded for it? Well, for most people the pricing for this device can prove a bit of a problem, as it will undoubtedly fetch you 700 or so dollars easily. While I can’t really recommend it for its full price, if you manage to get any sort of deal for this device it would be more than worth it.
GENERAL
As far as the general details go for this phone, there really isn’t too much to talk about. it uses the standard sorts of GSM networks for 2G, 3G and 4G, with minor network type differences between the Asia version and EMEA version of the phone, but only in the 3G and 4G parts. Those differences are too lengthy in numbers and you won’t really understand too much from them, so there’s really not much point in going on about them. As far as the SIM is concerned, you’ll find that the HTC Butterfly S uses Micro-SIM cards. You can currently purchase this device, having been announced in June and released in July.
BODY
While the device is beautiful in its design, I imagine not a lot of you are interested in that. Instead, I’ll just get down to brass tacks and tell you a bit about the size and weight of the device: we have 144.5 x 70.5 x 10.6 mm ( or 5.69 x 2.78 x 0.42 in ) in size and 160 g ( or 5.64 oz ) in weight. Altogether not a very large phone ( not uncomfortably large, anyway ).
DISPLAY
The HTC Butterfly S has a pretty darn good display, even rivaling some of the biggest flagships out there. This device has a Super LCD3 capacitive 16 million colors touchscreen on it which measures at 5.0 inches. This fabulous screen can fit a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels and has a pixel density of approximately 441 pixels per inch. It’s also protected to some degree by a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protective glass. If you’re interested in custom UIs too, know that the HTC Butterfly S has the HTC Sense UI v5 installed on it.
SOUND
Audio-wise, as opposed to some phones which lack any and all audio enhancements, the HTC Butterfly S has them all. Software-wise, well you know how HTC likes to implement Beats Audio on all their best devices. As far as hardware-based enhancements are concerned, we have a pair of stereo speakers instead of a large loudspeaker with built-in amplifiers.
MEMORY
The HTC Butterfly S only gives you one option: a 16 GB storage device. In case you need MORE for some ungodly reason, thret not for this device allows you to expand upon that with the card slot, allowing you to use any and all Micro-SD cards of up to and including 64 GB. The RAM amount on this device is also quite impressive, weighing in at 2 GB. Therefore, as far as the RAM is concerned ( and you’ll soon see that the hardware is also strong enough to allow it ), you WILL be able to run just about anything using this device.
DATA CONNECTION
As far as connectivity is concerned, the HTC Butterfly S has both GPRS and EDGE on it. The speeds for each of these are pretty standard-issue. The WLAN of this device is quite extraordinary, however: Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac with Dual-Band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and Wi-Fi hotspot. The Bluetooth of this device is v4.0 and has A2DP as well. Also, the HTC Butterfly S has NFC on it too and an Infrared Port. The USB port of this device is in Micro-USB v2.0 format with MHL on it ( therefore you can use it as a HDMI port with the right MHL A/V linking cable ).
CAMERA
The camera of the HTC Butterfly S is quite fenomenal in both strength and the fact that it’s loaded with features. The frontal camera of this device is a 2.1 MP snapper with HDR on it, where as the main one is a 4 MP camera which can photograph at 2688 x 1520 pixels resolutions and record video in 1080p full HD at 30 frames per second with HDR on as well. The many features of this camera include: autofocus, LED flash, 1/3″ sensor size, 2 µm pixel size, simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, face and smile detection and HDR. That main camera is also referred to as an Ultra-Camera, having some very large pixels.
BATTERY LIFE
Again, this battery is the exact kind that puts me off the most: the non-removable kind. Aside from that, it’s a pretty darn strong battery: a Li-Po 3200 mAh battery with enough strength to keep the phone alive for up to 544 hours or 659 hours in stand-by ( depending on the 3G or 2G that you keep on ) and for 29 hours of 25 hours ( again, depending on whether you keep it on 3G or 2G ). It can probably sustain heavy usage as well as far as media is concerned.
HARDWARE
Hardware-wise, the HTC Butterfly S is one of the strongest phones out there. It’s equipped with a Quad-Core 1.9 GHz Krait 300 processor, a Qualcomm APQ8064T Snapdragon 600 chipset and an Adreno 320 GPU. With all that power, it should be able to pretty much run anything coming out in the next couple of years.
SOFTWARE
The HTC Butterfly S has one of the better software versions out there: Android OS v4.2.2 Jelly Bean. This is one of the most stable and well working builds out there, that not only makes your phone work smooth, but it makes it look smooth while doing it.
FEATURES
I’ll try to be as brief as possible, as there are a lot of features to cover here. The sensors are plentiful: accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass. The messaging is done via: SMS ( with Threaded View ), MMS, E-Mail and Push Mail. The browser of this phone uses HTML5 and the phone itself also has Stereo FM radio with RDS and Java through MIDP emulation. The HTC Butterfly S’s GPD has built-in support for A-GPS and GLONASS. Also, this phone is available in a couple of colors: Black, White, Red and Gray ( out of all of them, I think Black and Red are the best looking, but that’s just my opinion ).
Here ‘s a brief list of what the HTC Butterfly S is capable of:
- SNS integration
- Dropbox (25 GB storage)
- Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
- TV-out (via MHL A/V link)
- DivX/XviD/MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player
- MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV/FLAC player
- Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk
- Organizer
- Document viewer/editor
- Photo viewer/editor
- Voice memo/dial/commands
- Predictive text input
This concludes our small review of the HTC Butterfly S. Hope it has helped shed some light on a few of the more obscure pieces of information and that it has helped you form an opinion about this device.
