Squeeze the brilliant U with HTC

The HTC U is said to have a feature called ‘Edge Sense’ involving touch sensors embedded in the frame around the phone — in other words, you could interact with the phone by squeezing it.

This isn’t a wildly new concept. Nearly five years ago my former colleague Jeff Blagdon and I saw a ‘Grip UI’ prototype from Japanese carrier NTT Docomo that was designed to show off use cases for the same technology — it could launch apps, perform voice searches, and unlock itself based on pressure input around the edges. A high-end HTC phone would certainly be the most prominent implementation of the idea yet, however. Elsewhere the HTC U is rumored to have a 5.5″ 2560×1440 display, a Snapdragon 835 processor, 12MP rear and 16MP front-facing cameras, and Android Nougat 7.1. Here’s hoping it’s better than the underwhelming U Ultra.