HTC Butterfly S

Available now
19th June 2013

We covered the original HTC Butterfly a couple of weeks ago, marking it out as a very desirable high-end Android smartphone that HTC doesn't want you to buy. The good news is that the Butterfly has had a welcome boost with an improved version called the HTC Butterfly S. The bad news is that we don't know when (or if) it will be available outside of Taiwan.

The main differences between the original Butterfly and the Butterfly S are the inclusion of the ultrapixel camera from the HTC One, plus a massive 3200 mAh battery which has 58% more charge than the old one and the Butterfly S now runs on a 1.9GHz quad-core CPU.

It's a big device with a large 5" full HD 1080 x 1920 pixel display, measuring 145 x 71 x 10.6mm and weighing 160 grams (20 grams heavier than the original). Inside is 2GB of RAM with 16GB of flash memory plus a microSD slot.

Music playback is enhanced with Beats Audio and the Butterfly S has stereo speakers, and it also supports NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and GLONASS plus all the usual Android features. We don't know what version of Android it runs, but our guess is that it will be 4.2. There is no mention of LTE support at the moment, but that doesn't completely rule out a 4G version in the future.

The ultrapixel camera is a four megapixel affair which actually sounds like a downgrade compared to the original, but it isn't. The sensors in the camera are much bigger than normal, leading to photographs which are much clearer and more vibrant.. reviews of the camera in the HTC One consistently say that it is one of the best smartphone cameras ever, and we can see no reason why the Butterfly S should be any different. There's a 2.1 megapixel unit on the front as well.

Unlike the HTC One, the Butterfly S is a pretty bland looking affair that isn't really going to turn heads. But the same thing can be said for most Samsung devices, so HTC are not alone.

The Butterfly S competes directly against the Samsung Galaxy S4 and comes with a reported price tag of about €570 which is the same price point as the S4. Crucially though, we don't know what markets it will be available in (apart from Taiwan in July) and it may well be that HTC will only give this a limited release in order to give the HTC One a clear run in some markets.