HTC Butterfly S: This Butterfly is a Beast

HTC just launched a new smartphone that is in some ways more premium than its flagship device, the HTC One. No longer cocooned in the depths of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer's inner sanctum, the HTC Butterfly S burst forth at an HTC' event in Taiwan Wednesday, and it's an impressive little beast.

The company's follow-up to the HTC Butterfly, the Butterfly S is slated for release in July in Taiwan, but no word on whether or when it flutter over to U.S. soil. The smartphone features a lot of beefed up specs, both compared to HTC predecessors and the flagship HTC One.

The HTC Butterfly S comes with a 5-inch full high definition 1080p Super LCD 3 display that packs 440 pixels per inch. That's pretty impressive, considering it is a third of an inch larger than the HTC One and gets nearly the same pixel resolution (the One sports a super dense 468 ppi). And the Butterfly S is made with Corning's Gorilla Glass 3, an upgrade from the One's display.

The device is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor at a hair whipping 1.9GHz, which is also an improvement on the HTC One. It features 2GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage with microSD card expansion for up to 64GB more storage, and it comes with two years of 25GB of free Dropbox, a cloud storage service. It will be running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with HTC's BlinkFeed user interface.

Just like the HTC One, the device has a 4-megapixel rear-facing primary camera with HTC's UltraPixel technology. The company says that their UltraPixel camera is better than other companies' 13-megapixel cameras, with a better dynamic range, lower signal-to-noise ratio, and better low-light photography. The Buttefly S also comes with an ImageChip 2 image processor with Zoe software, which films four seconds of video with every photo taken and can create highlight videos of multiple shots, along with effects, transitions, and a soundtrack. It also has the kind of automatic photo enhancement abilities like object removal capability and "always smile." The primary camera can shoot 1080p HD video and in slow motion, with variable speed playback.

The front of the camera features a 2.1-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens, along with the HTC BoomSound dual front speakers and sound engineering through HTC's Beats Audio partnership. Another really impressive feature of the HTC Butterfly S is its battery. While batteries aren't really the selling point of any device, we all know how important they can be when they're not adequate to the task of powering through your full day. The HTC Butterfly S should be up to the task, with an enormous 3,200 mAh battery, which approaches the capacity of the batteries in some smaller tablets. It also blows away the HTC One's 2,300 mAh battery (and the iPhone's and Samsung Galaxy S4's, for that matter).

If you're lucky enough to have a good chunk of cash saved away for such an occasion - and live in Taiwan - you'll be able to pick this up for the equivalent of about $769 U.S. dollars in July. For everyone else, we'll just have to wait and see if this beast of a Butterfly breaks out from the Taiwan and heads for other lands. Keep with us for more updates on the HTC Butterfly S and other technology news.