HTC U Play is official: a 5.2-inch mid-ranger with HTC's Sense Companion aboard

HTC starts 2017 on a relatively high note as it just announced two brand new intriguing devices - the 5.7-inch HTC U Ultra and the 5.7-inch HTC U Play. As we've already dedicated a separate story to the HTC U Ultra, it's only fair to devote some time to the U Play as well.  

Just like the HTC U Ultra, the HTC U Play comes with a metal frame sandwiched between two front and back glass surfaces. We are most definitely dealing with Gorilla Glass here; HTC shared its plans to launch an exclusive sapphire glass edition of the HTC U Ultra later this year, though we somewhat doubt that the smaller and less exciting U Play will have a similar faith. Nonetheless, HTC takes great pride in its shiny new Liquid design and spent a lot of time lauding it.

First of all, it's worth noting that unlike the HTC U Ultra, the U Play comes with no second ticker display on board. As far as specs are concerned, the U Play's display is a 5.2-inch one and has a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels, which sounds pretty okay for a screen of that size.


The device comes with a mid-range MediaTek Helio P10 chipset, which is a 64-bit octa-core affair. The phone also boasts some 3 gigs of RAM and 32GB of native storage, as well as a microSD card expansion slot. There's an optically-stabilized f/2.0 16MP camera with phase-detection autofocus at the back. Although it is larger than the 12MP UltraPixel shooter of the U Ultra, it has smaller 1µm pixels, which tells us that it might have worse low-light performance, in theory at least. Thankfully, the selfie front camera is also an f/2.0 16MP one that can snap wide panorama selfies of both you and your clique. Keeping the lights on will be a 2,500mAh juicer adorned with fast charging.