HTC has introduced a new flagship smartphone: the HTC U11. The successor of the HTC 10 starts with very good technical data as a direct competitor to the Samsung Galaxy S8, LG G6 and Sony Xperia XZ Premium in the market. In free trade, the HTC U11 is sold as a dual SIM version, which is rather untypical for flagship smartphones \and therefore particularly interesting. Also quite extraordinary: the HTC U11 comes with the latest Qualcomm chipset, the Snapdragon 835. The X16 modem included offers LTE category 16, depending on the network, data rates of up to 1 Gbit/s are possible. Higlight is the pressure-sensitive body (“Edge Sense”) as well as the ultrapixel camera.
Design with glass and metal
The 2016 flagship HTC has yet shipped with a metal case, the HTC U11, however, has a glass back, as you already know from the HTC U Ultra. Only the frame is still metal. There are a total of 5 different colors, but some colors such as red may comes later available.
The display is based on a 5.5 inch LCD with a 16: 9 aspect ratio (2560 x 1440 pixels) protected by Corning 3D Gorilla glass. Unlike LG on the G6 or Samsung on the S8, the HTC U11 does not have a special aspect ratio, which affects the dimensions of 153.9 x 75.9 x 7.9 millimeters.
A particularly innovative feature is “Edge Sense”. The HTC U11 reacts laterally in the lower body area to pressure, so certain functions can be started quickly and easily, for example the camera. Basically Edge Sense is freely assignable, in the summer HTC would like to make an app available, which should then also allow macros.
Art technology
HTC is one of the first manufacturers to introduce the modern Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. The heart of the smartphone contains many important components, especially processor, modem and WLAN chipset. The processor is a 64bit octa core, clocked at up to 2.45 GHz per core. The entire chipset is manufactured in the 10nm process and is therefore particularly energy-saving. The HTC U11 stands in the variant with 64 GB user memory by the way 4 GB of RAM available. A memory expansion via MicroSD card is possible; however, the dual SIM function is blocked.
The HTC U11 is especially up-to-date with the integrated modem. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 modem supports up to 1 Gbit/s in the LTE Cat16 downlink, up to 150 Mbps in the LTE Cat15 uplink. This is made possible by up to four bundled LTE frequency bands (4CC Carrier Aggregation) and by the 256QAM modulation in the downlink. The real speed that can be achieved depends, of course, also on the mobile network, in some countries, currently up to 500 MBit/s via LTE is possible. VoLTE and WiFi calling are, of course, also supported, as long as the network operator offers these services in his network. The LTE frequency ranges, which are supported by the HTC U11 as below:
- FDD: band B4 / B12 / B17 / B28/ B20 / B5 / B8 / B3 / B1 / B7 / B32
- TDD: band B39 / B40 / B38 / B41
In particular the support for band 28 (700 MHz) and band 32 (1500 MHz) is interesting. Currently, these frequency ranges are not yet used by the network operators, but this is likely to be relevant in the future and the HTC U11 is therefore very well equipped for the coming years.
Very good camera
The camera has been the focus of HTC’s flagship models for years. Also the HTC U11 is the camera to be a highlight. It offers a resolution of 12 megapixels on the back and a resolution of 16 megapixels on the front. UltraPixel 3 technology is used on the back, 1.4μm pixels are designed to allow a lot of light to enter the sensor. According to DxO-Mark, HTC has the U11 as the currently best smartphone camera on the market.
Available from June
The HTC U11 can be pre-ordered immediately and is available from June. Some network providers may offer the single card version, but there is also dual-sim version on www.4gltemall.com .