So HTC held their big new-phone event today, in London and New York at the same time (they streamed both cities on the site, which felt very "look how global we are"), and unveiled the HTC One. Unibody aluminum, 4.7 inch 1080p screen, quad-core Snapdragon 600 under the hood, two front-facing speakers that HTC's marketing people apparently named "BoomSound" with a straight face. It's a genuinely nice-looking phone. I'll get that out of the way first because the rest of this post is going to be me being annoyed about a word.
The word is "UltraPixel."
Here's the thing they're doing: instead of chasing higher megapixel counts like literally every other manufacturer since about 2004, HTC dropped the One's camera down to 4 megapixels and made each individual pixel physically bigger, so it can supposedly soak up more light. The pitch is better low-light shots, less noise, more accurate color. And look, I actually believe the underlying photography argument is real - pixel size does matter more than pixel count once you're past a certain resolution, and phone sensors are tiny to begin with so cramming 13 million photosites onto one is genuinely dumb from a physics standpoint. Nokia already proved the opposite extreme works too, with that insane 41-megapixel PureView 808 they put out last year, which does oversampling instead. Two totally different philosophies, both defensible.
What bugs me isn't the engineering. It's that they slapped a trademark-shaped name on "we lowered the megapixel count" like its a breakthrough discovery instead of a tradeoff. Every phone review site is going to run a headline this week that's some version of "HTC One's UltraPixel Camera Explained" and none of them are going to just say "it has a 4MP sensor with big photosites, here's what that means in practice," because that doesn't sound like a keynote slide. I've been reading phone spec sheets since the Nokia N95 and I have never once seen a company market a number going down as the interesting part before. Kind of respect the audacity, honestly, even while it annoys me.
Anyway, the rest of the phone: HTC Sense 5 is on here, with this new home screen thing called BlinkFeed that's basically a tiled news-and-social feed sitting where your app icons used to be, sort of a Windows Phone Live Tiles idea crossed with Flipboard. I need to actually use one before I have an opinion on whether that's good or just busy. No US carrier or price was announced today, which is such a normal HTC move it's almost funny - they've done this with basically every flagship, announce the hardware, make everyone wait weeks to find out who's selling it and for how much. The One X launch last year did the same thing and by the time it actually showed up on shelves half the hype had cooled off.
I'll say this too, because it's the elephant in the room: HTC had an genuinely rough 2012. Their profits basically cratered and Samsung ate their lunch in the Android flagship space while Apple ate everyone's lunch above that. This phone reads like a company betting the whole year on one device, which is a nervous feeling to have about a gadget you don't even own yet. I want it to be good. I want there to be a real third option in Android flagships that isn't just "whatever Samsung shipped this quarter," because the alternative is one company setting the price and spec floor for the entire ecosystem, and that's boring for everyone including Samsung.
Not buying one on day one regardless. My contract's got another eight months on it and my current phone still works fine, camera buzzwords or not. But I'll be curious what actual daylight and nighttime shots out of that sensor look like once reviewers get units in hand, instead of the carefully lit demo photos HTC is definitely going to be showing off this week.