HTC announces new, refreshed phones

HTC took the wraps off their newest products this week at Mobile World Congress and they had a lot to show off. They announced five new phones and a 7-inch tablet. Two of the phones are the rumored Facebook phones, which we'll discuss in another post. We'll also cover the tablet in another post.

For the most part, their new products were simple refreshes of existing devices. The three phones we'll discuss in this post, the Incredible S, Desire S, and Wildfire S are all updates to existing phones by the same names. Many have questioned why HTC went with the S suffix for these devices, since both the iPhone 3GS and Galaxy S have both previously used it. HTC didn't provide an answer to that question.



To quickly sum up the new devices, the Incredible S features a 4" screen, 1GHz processor, 8MP camera, and runs Android 2.3 with HTC Sense. The Desire S features a 3.7" screen, 1GHz processor, 5MP camera, and runs Android 2.2 with HTC Sense (though an update to Gingerbread is promised very soon). Finally, the Wildfire S features a 3.2" screen, 600MHz processor, 5MP camera, and runs Android 2.3 with HTC Sense.

The original Desire and original Wildfire never made it to any of the big four US carriers, but the original Incredible was one of Verizon's best selling among the Droid line. No word on release date, whether any of these will come to the US, or price.

These look nice, but I can't help feel underwhelmed. With all the other manufacturers announcing insane dual core, 3D, desktop-emulating, phones, it's hard to be excited about these which are simply minor upgrades to existing phones. There's nothing new or exciting here.

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HTC makes great phones, but these definitely aren't anything special. The only one I would even consider, size-wise, is the Desire S, but why would they release that running 2.2? Especially when the other phones are being released with 2.3? It doesn't make sense to me.