HTC’s squeezable U phone is apparently coming May 16th

HTC has announced an announcement: something’s happening on May 16th, according to a flyer sent out with the tagline “Squeeze for the brilliant U.” 

What on earth could that mean? Well, we’ve already heard word of an upcoming phone codenamed Ocean and likely to be officially called the HTC U, and it’s said to have a feature called “Edge Sense” involving touch sensors embedded in the frame around the phone — in other words, you could interact with the phone by squeezing it. 

This isn’t a wildly new concept. Nearly five years ago my former colleague Jeff Blagdon and I saw a “Grip UI” prototype from Japanese carrier NTT Docomo that was designed to show off use cases for the same technology — it could launch apps, perform voice searches, and unlock itself based on pressure input around the edges. A high-end HTC phone would certainly be the most prominent implementation of the idea yet, however. 

Elsewhere the HTC U is rumored to have a 5.5-inch 2560 x 1440 display, a Snapdragon 835 processor, 12MP rear and 16MP front-facing cameras, and Android Nougat 7.1. Here’s hoping it’s better than the underwhelming U Ultra.

The article was published on : theverge