HTC One To Be Android Flagship For 2013, Ultrapixel Camera May Come To Mid-Range Smartphones

According to HTC representatives, the One will be the company’s only flagship release this year, in contrast to previous years when the company brought out multiple high-end devices. The idea is simple: focus on marketing a single product to millions of potential customers across hundreds of carriers. The less HTC dilutes the top of the Android pyramid, the more room it has for its own flagship.

HTC’s Ultrapixel technology, the high-quality image capturing system powering the camera on its HTC One flagship smartphone, is likely to roll out to the company’s other handsets – including its more affordable mid-range offering.

A direct answer to the Nokia 808 PureView, a phone with a 41-megapixel camera which uses supersampling to improve the quality of the final five or eight megapixel captured image, the HTC One’s Ultrapixel technology offers similar claims: using multiple image sensors, rather than a single high-resolution sensor as with PureView, the camera captures each pixel in the final image multiple times in order to create a higher-definition picture despite an apparently low final resolution.

Asked whether the UltraPixel camera will land in more affordable HTC devices, HTC UK head Phil Robertson said: “It could … the core is around the sensor and the image chip that we are using.”

Don’t expect the full scale of improvements that the HTC One brings, though, as the Snapdragon 600 chip is a key part of the performance of the camera. More affordable devices clearly won’t feature such a powerful chip.

“However, the Qualcomm Chipset [used in the HTC One] does enable a lot of this to happen. The ability to take HD video and high-res images at the same time is powered by the quad-core on the device, as well,”Robertson noted.

Ultrapixel and BlinkFeed, two marquee features of the One, will eventually trickle down to cheaper devices. HTC has found success in entry-level smartphones like the Desire C, and will benefit from using consistent branding on all its future devices. Whether we’ll see these rumoured entry- and mid-range devices in 2013 is anyone’s guess, but we predict HTC will get itchy before the beginning of Q4 and out a couple of cheaper handsets.

HTC is also promising to bring Sense 5 to an array of 2012 devices, including the One X and One S.

[Omio]