The best camera phone no one wanted; The best I ever had
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This phone was revolutionary at the time for its "ultra pixel" low light sensitivity. Should it have been even a 5 megapixel? For sure. If they kept the same form and function, upgraded the RAM and the camera every year, to 8-12 megapixel 3GB-4GB RAM, kept working on the software, which was all already great, it would've been phenomenal. Instead HTC made the following models cheaper to produce, and sunk their company. You wouldn't believe what I was able to pull from a 4megapixel 2.0um rear camera on a 1.7Ghz quad core CPU and 2GB of RAM from 2013 to late December 2015. Gambling on the hype they made around their camera with it's "Ultra Pixels" when everyone was shooting 1.2um 8mpx stills, I shot 2.0um 4k at 12 frames per second in all kinds of lighting turning what was an initial disappointment into something remarkable. What I initially thought was an overhyped-underpowered "puny" 4megapixel with only a digital(crop)zoom turned out to be that same 35mm high school class that forces you to put away your kit lens so you learn your device and how to look through a fixed frame before I had ever even held 50mm. And the smooth, functional and surprisingly customizable Jellybean OS running HTC software on that Krait with her mated Image2Chip IPU never failed me. Something wonderfully unique about this phone was her power button, which doubled as an IR blaster. I could program her to any TV which led to endless fun in college when I hacked the common room flat screen, and I watched as my unsuspecting peers went to get the RA's remote to solve "The TV issue," only changing the channel or the volume back to the right settings when the RA came in before everyone's disbelieving eyes like some Loki trickster Djinn. But the thing that made her truly special? She was built like a tank. That all aluminum body with Corning gorilla glass took a hit like a prize fighter. I used to chuck it like a skipping stone across concrete floors to impress dates, " look at you and not my phone? Of course I love you more than my phone, watch" and -YEET- across the street, or park, or the mall like the wanna be edgy romantic anti-capitalist enby I didn't know I was yet was trying to be. Of course I knew she wouldn't break, that phone never failed me. And I didn't appreciate her until it was all gone. 90% of the work I did on that phone, some of my best work, gone a year after she died with a stolen laptop. What killed this marvelous mortal deity of a phone? I was a 22 year old homeless queer on the eighth floor of a dingy women's shelter off 46th street in Manhattan. They told me the top two floors were rebuilt after a fire nearly a half a century ago when it was an orphanage, and the souls of dead children haunted the place. There was a blizzard coming in, and I thought the way the city lights hit the snowfall was beautiful. Of course I gripped my darling phone carefully as I opened the window to shoot a unique style I had honed that turned the 4mp 12fps into something like an HD homage to super 8mm amateur film. As risky as I was then I didn't dare lean to far out lest I lose my precious favorite camera to a fall that in my penniless aloneness I had dreamt of before. Then in a flash, the window fell; not closed, fell - on me. It came completely out the wall, the cruel gravity of it's weight falling on to my wrists, then my chest; pushing me to the floor. My phone was sent flying for the last time, and this time against my will and all goodness in the world, careening eight stories to the hard NYC concrete below. My fellow homeless women rushed to help the window frame off me, and I dashed down fourteen flights of stairs and out to the street, already dusted with half an inch of the lightest, most beautifully white and sparkling snow. I found my phone, for the first time ever with her screen shattered, and dark. I pulled her gingerly into my hands, and with only a fool's hope I pressed the power button. Did she yet live? YES! Alas she was mortally wounded, the 48 meter fall to her doom broke not only her HSPA+ antenna but her power outlet as well. Her screen, cracked and dead on one corner, still worked, as did the Bluetooth and WIFI. I cried myself to sleep that night as I looked into the comforting glow of her screen, alone in the bed of my shelter, for the last time, connecting to the rest of the world and all my hope for the future through free NYC WIFI, as the battery slowly drained. HTC provided no support, and no one would take money to fix her, she was damaged beyond repair. I still have her, years later I took her apart with my computer science friend from RIT to see if anything could be salvaged. Part of me still hopes her memory survives somewhere, the ghost of falling snow still last on my camera reel, along with the rest of that dark, and beautiful, tragic, and exciting chapter of my life. I graduated high school, moved halfway across the world, joined the Marines, or tried to, lost everything, and found friendship, love and myself abandoned by the world and on my own in the greatest city in the world.
