HTC Butterfly S

HTC BUTTERFLY S REVIEW

The Butterfly S, from HTC, was first available for purchase on July 2013 (3 months ago). The HTC Butterfly S comes with a spacious 5-inch Super LCD3 display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels. We’re very impressed with it. The screen is extremely sharp and detailed, with a pixel density reaching 441 pixels per inch. You won’t be able to notice none of the annoying jagged icon edges or blurry text. We love the rich and saturated colors on this display. They are not hugely overblown as on AMOLED screens, but still deliver quite the punch. The Butterfly S does not have the brightest of screens. Its peak luminance reaches 360 units and that’s perfectly fine for using the device indoors, but is puts a bit of an extra strain on your eyes when you try to read the display outdoors. Viewing angles are fabulous. Colors don’t fade out even when you tilt the phone to most extreme angles. The HTC Butterfly S doesn't deviate much from the original Butterfly handset. The design of the Butterfly S remains pretty much unchanged, except for the additional front-facing BoomSound speakers like on the HTC One. This is a good design effort by HTC, as it makes sense for the audio to be directed straight toward the user rather than from the rear or the sides where it can sound muffled. The Butterfly S sports a 4-megapixel rear-facing UltraPixel camera and a wide-angle front-facing camera just like the HTC One. However, while the One has optical image stabilization, the Butterfly makes do with software image stabilization which simply isn’t as good. In addition, one of the key drawbacks of an UltraPixel camera is your limited ability to crop photos after you’ve captured them; this is a compromise made in return for the promise of better low-light performance. While photos shot in bright daylight turn out more than acceptable with balanced colours, it is in low-light situations that things get a bit hairy. I found that the Butterfly S often had trouble focusing accurately in low light and the photos it produced tended to be on the grainy side with the noise-reduction algorithm taking its toll on detail and sharpness. In comparing the photos shot by the Butterfly S and the Nokia Lumia 925 at the same time in the same location with both devices set on Auto mode, the Lumia 925 emerges as the victor more often than not, managing to capture more detailed and better-exposed low-light photos with more clarity. HTC’s camera app on the Butterfly S remains largely unchanged from the One. It features everything you’d expect from a modern Android camera app, including continuous burst capture with Best Shot, HDR photo and video capture, sweep panorama, slow motion video, 60fps video capture, face detection and a range of filters which I have never used. The app is well laid out and easy to understand; the Gallery app is similarly well thought out. It automatically organizes your captured photos into Events based on location and date/time tags, integrates with services like Facebook, Picasa, Flickr and Dropbox and features a rich set of image editing functions. HTC’s Zoe camera features are present on the Butterfly S; allowing you to save the exact frame you want to share out of a Zoe, generate a sequence shot, fix smiles in group photos, remove unwanted objects, smoothen skin, fix lighting, adjust face contours, enhance eyes and more. Zoes are comprised of a 3-second video clip and 20 images, but these 20 images will no longer clutter your Dropbox Camera Upload folder; instead, only the main frame will be uploaded. The Butterfly S also features Video Highlights, where a 30-second video comprised of a combination of stills and Zoes is automatically generated from any event. With Sense 5 on Android 4.2.2, there are now more built-in themes, but there does not seem to be a way to add more. As usual for an HTC device, the Butterfly S features Beats Audio in software that can easily be toggled on and off. Beats Audio improved the sound emanating from the Butterfly S’s speakers but does not benefit my listening experience much when my Jabra Revos are involved due to its propensity to overemphasize bass frequencies over everything else. The built-in music player remains top-notch with a clean and attractive user interface, a lyrics visualizer and artist image display. Listening to music and podcasts is definitely enjoyable with the Butterfly S’s front facing stereo speakers; you won’t feel the need to hook up a Bluetooth speaker to this smartphone to achieve sound that is nearly room-filling. The Butterfly S runs Android 4.2.2 out of the box with Sense 5 onboard. Sense 5 remains clean, modern and enjoyable to use with flat and minimalist gradients, elegant iconography and typography used throughout the user interface, although the adoption of newer Android UI standards such as the card-style lists and left-hand pull-out menu mean that HTC’s custom apps can feel a little dated and inconsistent next to third-party Android applications. Drop-down lists and icon toolbars in Sense 5 also seem to occupy more space than their vanilla Android counterparts; ditto for status bar icons which look unnecessarily large on the Butterfly S’s display. This device is an absolute performer in the battery life department. Charging it up to full and then leaving it unplugged throughout the night (around 8 hours) resulted in a negligible battery drain of 3%. I also found that the Butterfly S was able to reliably go through a full day of mixed use on HSPA+ without requiring a charge, and was able to stay powered throughout a night of clubbing. You will probably get 2 days or more out of the Butterfly S if you use it sparingly. The HTC Butterfly S boasts a 3,200mAh battery and a half day of uptime, a powerful processor, and a brilliant screen. Its camera performs well in low light, and a microSD card slot offers the option of adding more storage.

SPECIFICATION & FEATURES

HTC BUTTERFLY S PRICE

Price in USA $676

Price in UK £464

Price in EURO €550

Price in PAK Rs.70,900

Price in INDIA Rs.34,296