HTC Butterfly review: The droid monarch

Worry-free connectivity

The HTC Butterfly packs quad-band GSM and dual or quad-band 3G (depending on region) to go with its market-dependent LTE support.

The local wireless connectivity has Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and DLNA support (both client and server, for images, videos and music) and stereo Bluetooth 4.0.

HTC has conveniently designed a special options screen, when you connect the Butterfly with a PC. The long list of options includes Portable Wi-Fi hotspot, settings, USB and Bluetooth tethering (the phone becomes a modem).

NFC connectivity with Android Beam is present too. We found it to work hassle free.

There's a microSD card slot inside the Butterfly and the device supports up to 32 gigs of expanded storage.

HTC's Portable Hotspot. It can support up to 8 devices, you can WEP, WPA or WPA2 encrypt the hotspot and you can enable "allowed users" only to connect or leave it open for all (unsecure, but the quickest setup).

The app can be set to power off automatically after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, saving your battery in case you forget to switch it off when you are done with it.

The HTC Butterfly comes with an MHL port, so if you plug a MHL dongle in, you can output HD video over a standard HDMI connection. The phone's UI is mirrored on the TV and with the fullHD resolution of the display, watching on an HDTV is a joyful experience.

Like Sony, HTC have a propriety app that can help you transfer precious information like photos, contacts, messages, and more from your previous smartphone to the HTC Butterfly. HTC Transfer gives you wide selection of smartphones to choose from.

HTC's Transfer app

Even better Jelly Bean browser

HTC Butterfly comes with the latest version of the Android web browser. Coupled with the fullHD display and powerful processing power inside, the Jelly Bean web browser performs without hiccups.

Most of its UI is out of sight, leaving the entire screen to the web page. And even when it does appear it consists of a single bar, which now holds the address field, the Tabs and Menu dropdown shortcuts.

HTC has also thrown in some extra buttons at the bottom of the screen, which seemed to pop up when you scroll back to the top of a page, which was getting a bit annoying at times. You see sometimes those buttons appeared along with the top bar, whereas on other occasions they remained hidden when the top bar was showing.

Aside from being way too big, those mysteriously behaving buttons let you save a page in your bookmarks or reading list, view bookmarks, saved pages or tabs. You might want to enable Quick controls - they let you tap on any point on the edge of the screen and move your finger to select the desired option from a jog-dial menu.

Once you select some text, you can copy it, do a Google search with that text as the query or share the text over a message or social networking.

Browser

Tabs can be closed with an X button on their top right corner - they can't be swiped off the screen like you do in the app switcher. Incognito tabs are available if you want to browse without leaving traces.

Tabs • Most visited • Bookmarks • History

You can also request the desktop version of a site, instead of the mobile one. Another cool feature is preloading search results that the phone believes are relevant, speeding up the whole process.

The HTC Butterfly lacks Adobe Flash support so inline non-HTML5 videos are a no-go and so are gaming websites like Kongregate and Miniclip.

Flash isn't available

You can always sideload Flash from an .APK if you're dead set on having Flash capabilities, but there are no guarantees on how well it will work, or if at all.