HTC U12 Life Officially Announced With Two-Tone Design, Snapdragon 636 Processor

HTC has officially announced the HTC U12 Life, the mid-range version of its U12 Plus flagship that was released earlier this year. The U12 Life is also considered to be the direct successor to last year’s HTC U11 Life and it comes with a unique design.

The HTC U12 Life will be available in two color options: twilight purple and moonlight blue. The handset’s back comes with a dual finish design. The top portion of the back is covered with acrylic glass, while the lower section has matte metallic finish. The metallic finish is also striped, giving the U12 Life a distinct look and feel from the U12 Plus and the U11 Life.

The HTC U12 Life comes with a 6-inch 1,080 x 2,160 resolution display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Users who aren’t a fan of notches on smartphone display should be happy to know the HTC’s new mid-range handset doesn’t have a notch of any kind on top of its display.

Inside, the HTC U12 Life is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. There’s also a microSD card slot included in one of the SIM card slots, which will allow users to expand the device’s memory. In Taiwan, there will also be an HTC U12 Life model that comes with 128GB of internal storage, according to The Verge.

The Snapdragon 636 processor should be able to offer 40 percent better performance than the Snapdragon 630 that powered the U11 Life. Graphics performance is also said to have been improved by 10 percent. Powering all this up is a decent 3,600mAh battery. Unfortunately, the handset doesn’t support fast charging of any kind, but it does come with a 10W charger and it charges through a USB Type-C port, as pointed out by GSM Arena. The 3.5mm headphone jack is also here to stay.

As for cameras, the HTC U12 Life comes with dual cameras equipped with 16-megapixel and 5-megapixel sensors. The dual cameras have support for bokeh mode, phase detection autofocus, face detection, HDR photos and 4K video recording. Both lenses are equipped with an f/2.0 aperture lens.

Up front, the U12 Life comes with a 13-megapixel camera with a fixed-focus f/2.0 aperture lens. It also has a beauty mode for taking selfies, a timer, face detection and full HD 1080 video recording. Another thing about the front-facing camera is that it comes with its own LED flash, which should be useful when taking selfies in low-light environments.

On the software side of things, the HTC U12 Life will run Android 8.1 Oreo straight out of the box with HTC’s Sense UI running on top. The HTC U12 Life will be available in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in late September for £299 (349 euros). Unfortunately, HTC currently has no plans of bringing the handset to the United States.