HTC Confirms: Butterfly Not Coming To Europe
M7 with aluminum unibody chassis & upgraded 13 mega-pixel cam but 4.7-inch screen will be unveiled @MWC
The Butterfly HTC posted to their worldwide site [
www.htc.com/www/smartphones/htc-butterfly] is quad-band GSM with 850/2100 HSPA which means the specs are for a phone that would work in China. But the Qualcomm radio [APQ8064] (sames as in the OG and N4) is penta-band capable so activating the additional bands is just a matter of
s/w. It would seem odd for HTC to add the Butterfly to their global site (in English) if they only intended to sell it in China. So it could be sold elsewhere and all they'd have to do is update the radio and specs on their site or it may only be sold in China. Going solely off the info provided by various HTC offices in the EU is not a sure thing as they've been wrong before.
A little over a week ago, we caught wind of the HTC Butterfly, which the manufacturer had quietly added to its website without calling any attention to it. Considering that we only previously knew of plans to release the company’s 1080p Android to the US as the Droid DNA and to Japan as the J Butterfly, we wondered if this might be the global version of the phone. Something didn’t quite feel right about that, though, as the reported frequency support seemed far more limited than we’d expect from the international version of a phone. We heard rumors that backed-up those suspicions, claiming that the Butterfly (sans J) was actually going to be for the Chinese market alone, where it would arrive on China Unicom. That’s now sounding confirmed, as retailers get word of just where the Butterfly won’t be available.
Retailer Expansys had been taking Butterfly pre-orders, with the intent of selling the phone on the European market upon its release. That listing is now down, and customers who had already placed their orders are being contacted with the following message:
Thank you for your recent interest and preorder of the HTC Butterfly. Unfortunately, we have now been informed by HTC that this device will not be available in European markets, and as such we have had to remove it from our website and cancel your preorder.
While that doesn’t say China outright, it’s clear that the Butterfly is definitely not the full-on international version of this hardware; for that, we’ll just have to keep waiting.
X920e Chinese Commercial
