Here’s the big news: The J Butterfly 2’s shell is shiny polycarbonate and not metal, but don’t dismiss it out of hand just yet, because this has given HTC the chance to make the phone water resistant, and it now has an IP57 rating. Cleverly, according to some early hands-on reports, the phone’s design isn’t ruined by plastic port covers, but HTC isn’t saying exactly how it keeps things watertight without them.
The other major change comes with the camera, which has 13-megapixels, rather than the UltraPixel version’s 4 megapixels. The J Butterfly 2 also has the One M8’s additional sensor for capturing depth information, ready to give your photos a professional look. Inside the J Butterfly 2 is a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor with 2GB of RAM, and there’s a choice of either 16GB or 32GB of internal storage space, plus a MicroSD card slot.
Around the front, a pair of BoomSound speakers are mounted above and below the 5-inch, 1080p screen, but they’re set in a plastic frame and not a metal one. The phone has 4G LTE connectivity – but only for Asia at the moment – plus features such as NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, a 2700mAh battery, and a 5-megapixel front facing selfie camera. Audio experts JBL have spiced up the audio performance on some models using its LiveStage Signal Processing Technology, and the Japanese version of the phone comes with a set of exclusive JBL in-ear headphones too.
HTC will put the J Butterfly 2 on sale in Taiwan on September 2, before it makes its way to Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. The J Butterfly HTL23 is only for Japan, but a final release date isn’t known yet.
This could be the start of a big day for HTC, which is also expected to launch another version of the One M8 later on, this time with Microsoft’s Windows Phone software installed.
