HTC just unveiled two new Windows Phones that will be landing in stores around the world later this year, running our latest version of Windows Phone. A lot of people ask me via Twitter “what phone are you using now”. I’m delighted to say in rotating through various phones and helping our partners finish them with high quality, I’ve spent quite a bit of time carrying one of the prototypes of these HTC phones and it’s terrific. For those of you who haven’t read the press details—here’s a quick recap. HTC introduced the phones in a series of meet up style events in London, Paris, Berlin and Madrid, and they’ll be broadly available from October 2011 globally, beginning in Europe and Asia, with pricing info to come later. In the meantime, let’s dig into what makes these phones awesome.
First up, the HTC TITAN features a big 4.7-inch screen with a slim 9.9mm brushed aluminum shell, and a front facing camera, is a great device for working or for playing. Movies, music and your favorite apps will really come to life on this big screen. Sometimes I hear feedback from some users that “fonts are a little small” on WP7—absolutely not the case on the TITAN! As designers, we love seeing the wide variation of phone sizes so that our customers can find one that’s the perfect fit for them.
The second phone announced today was the HTC Radar. The first thing you notice with this phone is the unique design, crafted with an aluminum unibody shell. The Radar also includes a front facing camera so you can video chat with your favorite people. I am really excited to see phones like the Radar, because it’s a great marriage of beautiful software and great hardware design.
A lot of you have asked us whether Mango will support front facing cameras—and now that these HTC phones have been formally announced, I can confirm officially that Mango does support these. We’ve included support for “switching to FFC” for photo/video shooting into the native camera experience and we’ve added API support to the application platform so ISVs can build all kinds of interesting apps using the FFC. We’ll have more announcements on some of the specific apps that will take advantage of this capability a little later on.
The announcement of these new HTC phones is a big milestone in our march to Mango, with many more exciting things still to come!
-JoeB