Gadgetory

hey this is Dan with The Verge and this is the new HTC u12 plus it's a successor to last year's u11 and you will evan plus they're available in other parts of the world and it's a company's 2018 flagship smartphone now a lot of things are very similar to the U 11 in terms of design and features but there's definitely some more modern upgrades here and starting with the screen you can see it's a bigger screen than before it's now a six inch panel it's a very high resolution qhd+ and it's a Super LCD 6 panel instead of AMOLED that we're seeing on other devices but it does have HDR 10 support now in the process of adding that bigger screen HTC did make the bezels on the u12 plus smaller above and below and then also on the sides so the YouTube all plus is actually a little bit narrower than last year's u 11 which makes it a little bit easier to hold and the obvious change here is that the fingerprint sensor is now on the back it's just below the camera but it's right under where your finger would land as opposed to on the front in terms of design it's very similar to last year's phone it still has HTC's liquid metal type of design which uses curved glass and these very reflective finishes with a metal frame it's available in three different colors there's a translucent blue and a black available in the US and then there's this flame red color that will be coming to other markets across the world all of them are very premium very pretty they really feel nice and well built as you kind of would have expect from a HTC phone at this point a couple other different features on the hardware as well now there's still HTC edge Sense technology which means that you can squeeze the phone to do different things like it's squeezed to turn on the flashlight here you can set it to whatever things you want you could set to launch assistant or launch camera or launch an app or anything like that that hasn't changed too much from last year's phone but one new feature is ability to double tap so you can double tap it to set different things right now this set so brings up some buttons on the screen but you can set it to open an app or change the screen size and things like that and then the buttons here on the side the power and volume rocker are not actual buttons in the sense that you're used to they don't really depress when you press them instead you get a little buzz when you click the button which feels weird at first but it's kind of neat it uses the same kind of underlying technology there's the pressure sensitivity on the sides but it's applied to the buttons here so that's the front on the bottom you got a USBC charger there's no headphone jack not huge surprise there the one that headphone jack last year so unfortunately there's not one this year but each should see does bundle its you sonic headphones in the box so you get those with the phone when you buy it and it does have dual speakers so there's speaker on the bottom as well as speaker on the top for pretty loud and vibrant sound inside the you 12 plus has a Snapdragon 8045 processor six gigabytes of RAM and it comes in 64 or 128 gigabytes of storage both of them support micro SD card expansion as well and then of course like last year it is ip68 water-resistant now the other big new thing here is that it's got dual cameras and not just on the back like we've seen on a lot of phones lately but also on the front so there on the back there's two cameras there's a 12 megapixel sensor on the wide-angle camera and then a 16 megapixel sensor on the telephoto camera and that lets you do the standard portrait mode blurring bokeh effect type of things and then on the front there's two eight megapixel sensors here that allow you to do those things for your selfies as well one thing that is unique is HTC software lets you actually adjust the effect of the bokeh after the fact and then you can also change the focus point around which is kind of a unique feature that we haven't seen before the u12 plus is launching with android 8.0 Oreo out of the box it will be updated to Android P at some point later this year but there's no timing yet for that it's running HTC Sense interface which if you've been using it for the past couple of years you know that it's pretty similar to what Google provides on its pixel phones but not exactly it's still it's very clean easy to use version of Android there's really little to complain about with Android on HTC phones at this point HTC has been building premium phones for years and the u12 is really no different it feels great when you hold it it's got really nice tight tolerances materials are really nice and it's also because it's a little bit narrower it's actually a little easier to hold it'd be nice if it had wireless charging but unfortunately that's not available this year but it does have quick charging over USB through quick charge 3 or quick chart 4 if you have a compatible charger now with that premium feel comes a premium price and this is gonna be priced pretty much in the same range as other premium Android smartphones that you can buy right now and HTC is not gonna be selling this through carriers but you will be able to get it through HTC comm or amazon.com and it's going to support Verizon AT&T or t-mobile pre-orders actually start today it's going to be shipping in the beginning of next month for more on the HTC u 12 including our forthcoming review or we'll take a look at all of these features in more detail please check out the verge comm as well as subscribe at youtube.com slash the verge