IDG News Service - HTC has declared the end of megapixels with its new One smartphone, which has a 4.7-inch screen and a redesigned camera that can capture sharper images.
The smartphone has an ultra-pixel camera that takes photographs at a rate of eight frames per second. The result is sharper images with deeper colors compared to the cameras in competing smartphones, said Jonah Becker, design director at HTC, at the phone's launch event in New York.
"The era of the megapixel is over," Becker said.
A new app called Zoe provides a live gallery so that users can highlight and edit images.
The phone is a redesign of the first HTC One phones the company introduced around this same time last year at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. It has some of the latest smartphone hardware including a quad-core Snapdragon processor running at 1.7GHz. It also has a 468 pixels-per-inch display.
The new phone will launch in more than 80 countries with 185 mobile carriers, which will be HTC's largest rollout ever. The phone will begin shipping in late March.
It will launch through AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in the U.S. The company did not immediately announce pricing.
The HTC One can record high-definition video, and has two dual microphones and noise cancellation technology. Like the previous HTC One models, it also has Beats Audio for quality audio playback. It has two front-facing stereo speakers.
It has an updated Sense user that makes browsing and using the phone easier.
HTC has partnered with companies to deliver news, video and picture through a new content feed service called Blinkfeed. Content from MTV, AP and ESPN are delivered directly to the phone, and users can select the content they want delivered to their phone.
The new phone comes as the company tries to reverse its fortunes in the smartphone market with growing competition from Apple, Samsung, Huawei and others.
HTC was the fourth-largest smartphone in 2012, shipping 32 million handsets, with shipments falling by 25.2% compared to 2011. The company had a market share of 4.6%, and fell behind Samsung, Apple and Nokia. HTC's market share has been dropping and the company was not in the top five smartphone vendors during the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC.
Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com
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