HTC’s new Bolt is like the 10 but with last year’s processor

Have you ever looked at HTC’s excellent flagship smartphone, the HTC 10, and thought: “I really like it, but I wish it came with last year’s Snapdragon 810 processor”.

Well, you’ve got your wish. Meet the HTC Bolt.

HTC’s new high-end smartphone comes with a 5.5-inch Quad HD Super LCD 3 display tucked under the protective arm of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5. Inside, it’s sporting 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (expandable via microSD) and Qualcomm’s 2015 flagship processor, the octa-core Snapdragon 810.

Snapdragon’s 810 chip gained notoriety after several tests, notably on the HTC One M9, found that the processor frequently overheated. Although Qualcomm has come out to deny these claims, there are many who are more than a little wary of this particular processor.

That said, Engadget did note that they experienced no such problems during their time testing HTC’s Bolt so maybe users have nothing to worry about now. And that’s a good thing because the Bolt does have some things going for it.

First up it’s HTC’s first all-metal unibody smartphone to feature water resistance. It’s rated at IP57 (if you want to know what this rating means click here) so you can submerge it in 1m of water for up to 30 minutes.

Besides that, the HTC Bolt also comes with the Taiwanese company’s excellent craftsmanship. It also looks a lot like the HTC 10, though Cnet has noted that this smartphone is flatter and a little more uncomfortable to hold with all its edges.

Beyond that, the handset also comes with a 16-megapixel camera that comes with OIS and isn’t UltraPixel. In front, it sports an 8MP selfie snapper. On the software side, it will be running Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box with HTC’s Sense skin running on top.

It’s also got a 3,200 mAh battery that supports Quick Charge 2.0. Other features include a fingerprint scanner and a lack of a headphone jack. Perhaps whether that’s a feature or not depends on who does the removing, but the HTC Bolt will be utilising its USB Type-C port to double as a headphone jack instead. Good news is that they’re including a pair of USB Type-C HTC BoomSound Adaptive earbuds with each device.

HTC says Adaptive because these new headphones apparently automatically sets up a personal audio profile based on how well you can hear certain tones. When you plug the headphones in your ear, it’ll play a tone and the Bolt will interpret that sound, creating an audio profile designed for your ears.

But there’s more bad news. If you’ve been excited about any of this so far and want to pick one up, you can’t, at least not in Malaysia. The HTC Bolt is a smartphone that’s been made exclusively for Sprint and will cost USD599 (around RM2,625). It’s Sprint’s fastest smartphone yet and it is designed to show off the company’s 3x20MHz Carrier Aggregation technology. It also has the endorsement from the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt.

Unfortunately, because of this, it seems unlikely that this handset will be sold outside of the USA. Perhaps under a different name with slightly different specifications? Who knows.

[SOURCE, 2, 3, 4]