HTC's press conference began about 18 minutes late on Tuesday, Feb. 19. Peter Chou, the Taiwanese company's CEO, appeared at a mirror event in London while company president Jason MacKenzie attended the New York launch. Without much preamble, MacKenzie revealed the One (no letters), known as the M7 in development, while people were still piling into the room.
"The HTC One improves every part of the smartphone experience," MacKenzie said, according to CNet's live feed. He took the chance to show off HTC's new Sense UI and announced a partnership with ESPN, who is the leading partner in the BlinkFeed app, which appears to have similar functionality to FlipBoard. Edward Erhardt, ESPN's president of global customer marketing and sales, also appeared on stage to promote the partnership.
MacKenzie said that ESPN's outreach to any market it can is in line with HTC's philosophy, while Erhardt praised BlinkFeed's ability to make ESPN's brand "borderless" by pushing content to people's phones. It will essentially turn the phone's homescreen into a live tile window that streams curated news and entertainment to users.
MacKenzie moved on to announce front-facing speakers, going by the name "BoomSound" and a music player that can pull lyrics and display them in time to music. CNET's Brian Bennett commented, "Oh boy, BoomSound is going to make my subway commute a lot more painful."
SenseVoice will offer high-quality sound recording (which Bennett says reporters will love) and SenseTV turns the One into a remote with an infrared blaster. The new phone has a 4-megapixel camera, now called "ultrapixels" which are supposedly larger in size and let in more light, producing better-quality photos in low-light conditions. Compared to similarly-priced competitors with 8MP cameras, CNET says, making this a risky move on HTC's part.
After weeks of speculation and leaks, and even a one-week counter on its site, HTC finally confirms the HTC One's existence, names, specs, apps and UI. Much of the information has already been in circulation, although the HTC Voice, Sense, BlinkFeed and Zoe, the native image viewer and editor, are newly public. The HTC One is rectangular and flat, CNET reports, extremely thin and "practically all screen." Sounds pretty slick to us.
The One will go on sale in the UK on March 15, on all networks. Stateside, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Best Buy will carry it.
