The HTC U12 Life has come to Berlin and soon will
head out to the world at the end of September. It runs Android 8.1 Oreo, though
not Android One. The back of the phone features two distinct textures – smooth
acrylic glass and horizontal lines etched into the glass. The end result is
reminiscent of the Pixel phones, but has its own look too. Two color options
will be on offer: Moonlight Blue and Twilight Purple.
Around the front is a 6-inch 18:9 screen, the same
size as the U12+ screen. It has a 1,080 x 2,160px resolution so it’s not quite
as sharp, but the good news is that HTC held strong and didn’t add a notch.
Unlike the U12+, however, the U12 Life does have a 3.5mm jack.
There are two things important in Life – photography
and battery life. For the latter, the phone comes equipped with a 3,600mAh
power cell. There’s no fast charging on board, however, there’s just a regular
10W charger in the retail box. At least it charges over USB-C.
For photography, the HTC U12 Life has a 16+5MP dual
camera on its back. The main sensor is behind an f/2.0 aperture and has Phase
Detection AF. The secondary sensor is used for bokeh mode. On the front is a
13MP camera (f/2.0, fixed focus), which has its own LED flash for selfies after
dark. The rear camera records 2160p/30fps and 1080p/60fps video, for selfie
videos the max resolution is 1080p.
A Snapdragon 636 chipset is hooked up to 4GB of RAM.
There’s 64GB of built-in storage that can be expanded via the microSD slot. On
the connectivity side, the HTC U12 Life is a dual SIM phone with LTE (Cat. 11,
up to 600Mbps down, 75Mbps up). Both SIMs can connect to LTE networks. Then
there’s the Usual mix of Wi-Fi ac, Bluetooth 5, NFC and GPS/GLONASS.
The phone will launch in Europe, Asia and the Middle
East in late September. The UK price will be £ 300 (that's around € 335).
