After a long time, we have some new phones from HTC & the HTC U19e is the latest mid-ranger from the brand that launched in Taiwan today. At TWD 14,900 or $474, it is not the best phone that you can get, but it is quite good considering all the specifications.
One of the striking aspects of the U12e is its design. There is a translucent back panel which lets you take a look under that back panel. There is a liquid glass panel on the rear which we saw in previous HTC devices like the U11. The fingerprint scanner is placed on the back & there is also a dual camera setup placed vertically.
The phone doesn’t have any notch or cutout on the front. There is a 6-inch 18:9 Full-HD+ display (1080 x 2160 pixels) with Corning Gorilla Glass on top. Interestingly, there is also an Iris Scanner on the front along with the selfie camera, something we used to see on Samsung’s premium phones. This is used for unlocking the phone by scanning the Iris.
The processor powering the HTC U19e is the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 that comes with Adreno 616 GPU. There is 6GB DDR4X RAM & 128GB internal storage with an option to expand the storage via micro SD card. There is a big 3,930mAh battery underneath & the phone supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 4 via the USB Type-C port (3.1).
Coming to the cameras, there are two on the rear. The primary is a 12MP camera with f/1.8 aperture & PDAF along with a secondary 20MP f/2.6 telephoto camera with 2X Optical Zoom. On the front, there is a 24MP f/2.0 camera along with a 2MP Iris Scanner.
Some camera features include Automatic HDR, Panorama mode, Slow motion mode, Pro mode, 4K recording (Rear Camera), Beauty mode, Portrait Mode, etc.
Finally, Android 9 Pie runs out of the box with HTC Sense UI on top. There is also support for HTC BoomSound Hi-Fi Ultrasound.
The price, as mentioned in the beginning, is TWD 14,900, which translates to around $474. We don’t know if this phone will launch outside the Taiwanese market or not. If it does, let’s hope HTC would keep the price lower than that for the Taiwanese market.