TechTheDay

Taiwan-based electronics company HTC, who is celebrating their 20th anniversary this week, has just unveiled their newest flagship smartphone in a live event, the HTC U11. And the thing that caught everyone’s eye about this new phone is its unique feature: it does things when you squeeze it.

Squeeze It!

HTC introduced a revolutionizing new function called “Edge Sense”, pressure-sensitive edges that lets their new flagship phone takes commands just by having the user squeeze on different areas and in varying degree of strength. For example, squeezing lightly opens Google Assistant, squeeze it harder for opening the camera and squeeze it again to take a selfie. In a report by BBC, HTC claims that the feature will work whether the phone has a case, or you’re wearing gloves, or even underwater. Darren Sng, HTC’s head of global product marketing, says that they’re trying to innovate by making people think differently about their phones and how they interact with it. He claims that phone have become less exciting and that phones are just getting faster and bigger. He said that changing the way people handle their phones helps them think about new form factors. HTC also said that third party apps will be able to take advantage of this new feature later this year after the phone is released to the market this May 18th in Asia and in June elsewhere worldwide.

The U11

The U11 itself looks fairly standard. While everyone seems to be moving towards removing those thick black bar to maximize display the U11 still has them. It also still has a home button. In a closed door meeting, HTC claimed that they can’t move towards that direction yet because they’re at a disadvantage. Both LG and Samsung has their own display divisions that lets them able to customize screens for their phones. HTC doesn’t have that. They buy their parts from other companies.

Well, like mentioned earlier, with the exception of the squeezable edges the phone is pretty standard. Its overall size is 153.9 x 75.9 x 7.9 mm. It weights at 169 grams. The screen is 5.5 inches with a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels. The OS is Android 7.1, Nougat and the chipset is a Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835.

The phone has a single and dual sim versions and both has a microSD slot for up to 256GB. It has an internal memory of 64 GB with 4 GB RAM. It runs everything on a non-removable Li-Ion 3000 mAh battery. The primary camera is 12 megapixels while the secondary is 16 megapixels with UltraPixel3 technology.

U11 comes not only with Google Assistant, but also with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant. This will be the first time the two rival voice assistants will be made available together in one phone.

HTC has also decided to remove the headphones jack from this new device. This means that the users will have to use a set of wireless headphones or use an adapter. But don’t worry: the phones comes with a free adapter. The phone also comes with a pair of USonic in-ear buds with active noise-cancelling. HTC’s Boomsound feature also makes a comeback in the new phone. So far the price tag seems to be at £649 or $724.

I’m really curious as to how the public will receive this device because it seems really weird to squeeze a phone. A reviewer from Trusted Reviews even stated that he felt he might drop the phone while squeezing it. I also wonder if users might accidentally trigger Edge Sense if they put the phone in a tight pocket such as in your pants. Also, what kind of apps would even use this new feature?

A peculiar smartphone with a gimmicky feature. Will the U11 be enough to help HTC compete with its rivals this year?