HTC Butterfly - The Prince that never was crowned

 
Heard of a phone called Butterfly??. Well, most might not have. So here is the story of a great phone which made a silent entry to the Indian markets.

Another HTC first in the smartphone sector with a HD screen, this being the sibling of the DROID DNA. This one though never made too much noise. It had the strength and prowess but never made it in the big names or by the looks of it HTC never wanted it to. Enough with the history of the phone. Lets get down to business. First lets get the technical specifications of the phone.
Check Technical Specifications from GSM arena with a few edits for the Indian Market.
All the reviews by me are late on the scene as I wanted to spend quality time with these devices & as I've not gotten time to write the same before this ;-P. Also the reviews are not ultra high tech reviews, but product experience reviews.

Product Package:

The retail package of this one is pretty much the usual HTC offering. It contains a pair of standard earphones (not in-ear), the power adapter, the data cable which is also doubled as power cable with the power adapter, documents & the phone itself. There is nothing special about the package.
I guess ever since the Sensation XE with Beats headset package debacle HTC has chosen to go with the Standard packs with all its phones.

Design:

The one I have been using is a Black HTC Butterfly. The design is all new from HTC with tapering edges on both sides of the phone, which gives the phone a very thin profile when you look at it. There are red accents on both sides of the phone as well as the speaker grille of the phone which gives it a slight different look when it comes to the sea of black or white slabs out there.

The materials used on the phone do look premium. The rubbery polycarbonate material used for the uni-body of the phone did look like a scary bit on the phone when I started using it & was even drawn to buy a back cover for the same to avoid scratches on the same. But, the back though a fingerprint magnet seemed to be a problem at the start as most rubbery finish surfaces on electronics usually wear out, but this one hasn’t and believe me I am a rough user.

The top side of the phone has the standard 3.5mm audio jack, the uncomfortably placed power button & the micro SIM as well as the microSD card slots. The right hand side has a good & responsive volume rocker. The bottom of the phone has the microUSB charging/data transfer point. The microUSB slot is MHL enabled for direct HDTV viewing (Tested with the MHL adapted of S2)
The phone feels comfortably in your palm for a 5 incher. But, its not as comfortable as a 4.3 incher or even a 4.7 incher phone, but all the woes about the screen size will be settled the moment you put the screen on.

Display:

The display is as crisp as you may like. The text readability is non straining & makes you read more on the screen. The colour reproduction is natural & when compared to the likes of SuperAMOLED's it looks dim, but thats only because most SuperAMOLED's over saturate the colours which really seem to enhance the image, but in reality the images maybe dull.
The sunlight legibility isn't the best. But, you can make do with it.
The HD display advantages are seen when you watch the details in clarity in full HD videos on it. But the blacks aren't too deep but near perfect. This is by far the best LCD HD screen in market that I have played with.

 

User Interface & Features:

Sense 4+ is a upgrade from previous versions of the Sense (the android skin by HTC). The animations & graphic elements have been reduced, but its still away from vanilla Android 4.1.1 that it runs out of the box.

No settings control in the notification area is quite annoying, but you will get used to it as you use it.
There are usual set of customization tricks in this HTC too, from the widgets to the scenes to the lock screens & they have improved from the previous versions.

The Recent Apps viewer is amazing & sometimes you just play by killing apps on it, though a "kill all" option is missing.

The phone book & Social Media integration is deep and most helpful with the only requirement being logging into the various accounts.

Calling interface is simple with smart as well speed dial functionalities.

Google Now one of the Jelly Bean features is extremely useful & the Google navigation is spot on regardless of where you are (at least it was for the places I've travelled).
 

 Camera & Gallery:

 The Camera on the HTC Butterfly is the same that we have seen on the HTC One X & X+. The interface is kept quiet simple to use.

The options such as direct access to the gallery, auto-rotation on the camera interface & taking a photo by touching anywhere on the screen are good options on the base camera app itself.

There is also a range of filters in the camera which can be used on both the still as well as video camera.

The gallery is well connected to the social media as well as the cloud storage options.

The gallery has various sorting options for the pics on the phone, either taken by the phone cam or downloaded or transferred according to albums or by date when they are taken.

Sound & Music Player:

The sound quality on the Butterfly is good. The loudspeaker is one of the louder ones and the amplifier is effective. It seems that finally the partnership of HTC & Beats audio has made sense. Once the headphones are on the beats integration comes alive with loud and clear quality of the music.

The Music app when opened gives us the option to either go into the Music/TuneIn Radio. There is no regular Radio on the phone. 

There are various options for sorting such as as albums, playlists & also songs.

The rest of the Music player is like any other android phone. The lock screen offers controls on the lock screen itself for the music player when it plays. There is also Soundhound integration on the music player for song recognition. There is Gracenote which checks for album art, but is not too useful for local music albums.

Battery Life:

It has a decent battery life which lasts almost a day when used with a wi-fi connection at home & office with only the commute using up 3G connections with a considerable amount of browsing & playing games. But, take the phone into 3G connections the whole day and the story is entirely different & the battery doesn’t even last 7-8 hours with medium usage.
 
 

Performance:

The phone is quite the performer with no lags at all even running the heavy games from the play store. The results of a few benchmarks run on the phone are as given below:

 

 

Pros:

· 5" 16M-color 1080p Super LCD3 display with 441 ppi pixel density.
· Curved glass display.
· 16GB of built-in storage; microSD card slot
· MHL-enabled microUSB port
· Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
· Polycarbonate unibody
· Great audio quality and Beats audio enhancements
· Loud & clear Call quality
· Deep SNS integration.
· Nice customizations.

Cons:

· No NFC for a phone in this price range.
· Awkwardly placed uncomfortable power key
· No shortcuts or connectivity toggles in notification area
· Uninspiring camera performance
· Bad battery life on 3G networks.
· Pricing
· Ridiculous name.

Verdict:

3 out of 5 Stars

Images courtesy www.gsmarena.com.

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