HTC's New Smartphone Display Puts Apple To Shame

The HTC J Butterfly is perhaps the Taiwanese company's most gorgeous smartphone yet. The new device, announced Wednesday, has a display that measures 5 inches across the diagonal and packs an eye-popping 1920 x 1080 pixels, making it a full HD display with 440 pixels per inch.

This puts the J on an entirely new playing field with respect to competing devices.

Apple's iPhone 5, for example, has a 4-inch display with 1136 x 640 pixels. That equates to 326 pixels per inch. Apple calls this high-density screen a Retina Display, which it uses for its marketing materials. There's no doubt the Retina Displays look great. But the J beats it. By a lot.

The J also beats Samsung's Galaxy Note II by a wide margin. The Note II's 5.5-inch display has 1280 x 720 pixels, giving it a pixel density of just 267 pixels per inch.

[ HTC needs this. See HTC Losing Smartphone War One Quarter At A Time. ]

The J's full HD display has 2.07 million pixels, compared to the iPhone 5's 0.72 million pixels and the Galaxy Note II's 0.92 million pixels. Wow. Toss in the 16:9 aspect ratio, and you have a device that can devour full HD content on the go.

All right, I'll stop gushing over the display. Moving on.

The J Butterfly is powered by Qualcomm's Krait chip. That means four cores of Snapdragon processors at 1.5 GHz each with 2 GB of RAM. With so many pixels to push, the J needs this monster engine under the hood.

Other specs include NFC, LTE 4G, and an 8-megapixel camera. It ships with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, HTC's Sense 4+ user interface, and a bold design.

The bad news, however, is that this device is an exclusive for KDDI in Japan (hence the "J" moniker). The J will reach KDDI in December. HTC hasn't indicated if or when a variant of the device might be made available to other markets around the world. Given HTC's weak performance of late, the more markets it can sell the Butterfly in, the better. It has all the hallmark features an iPhone and Galaxy Note II killer needs.

As long as HTC gets the software performance finely tuned, the Butterfly could be the phablet of the future.