Geek: You know what that smartphone with a barely pocket-able 5-inch screen needs? An NFC-capable remote control that allows you to hold a slimmer piece of plastic to your head as you make phone calls and control media playback. Sure, you could just buy a smaller phone, but in case you hadn’t thought of that HTC has announced the Mini.
Japanese carrier KDDI has just announced a new HTC J Butterfly, a handset which resembles the HTC One in specs, but with features aimed at KDDI's home market. Like a lot of other Japanese devices, the 5-inch, full HD handset is waterproof in case you feel like taking fish photos. And HTC has brand new cameras: a 13-megapixel rear dual-camera model with a selfie-friendly 5-megapixel front shooter. That differs from the One M8's 4-megapixel Duo "Ultrapixel" camera. KDDI instead calls it a "Duo Effect" camera, with the secondary 2-megapixel module giving depth-of-field adjustment and other features. Filling out the spec sheet are a Snapdragon 801, 802.11ac WiFi, LTE-Advanced, 150Mbps 4g, 2GB of RAM, Android 4.4 KitKat and a Dot View case. All of that sounds pretty nice, but will it come to US shores? Hard to say, but the last J Butterfly model did eventually arrive as the Droid DNA (to Verizon), so we wouldn't be surprised to see the new model here too.
DroidLife: "Remember back in September when we found the massive changelog to an update for the DROID DNA that detailed out its receiving of Android 4.2.2 and Sense 5? We still aren’t sure why it needed a four month delay to finally arrive if it was seemingly ready back then, but it actually is officially ready now. Verizon posted up the support documents for the update this morning as build 3.06.605.4. As you can imagine in a jump to 4.2.2 and HTC’s Sense 5, which is an overhaul of their Android skin, the changelog is significant (5 pages to be exact). "
Computerworld: HTC's new Android smartphone has some standout hardware elements, but the phone suffers from significant drawbacks.
