HTC U Ultra Update Preloads The HTC Sense Companion

It hard not to feel ambivalent with the HTC U Ultra. Once you get past the beautiful smudge magnet and the flurry of "U" buzzwords, you're practically left with a smartphone that is, so far, failing to live up to expectations. "Meh" would probably be the most common sentiment here. But perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the U Ultra is the one feature that could have made a difference: the HTC Sense Companion. Absent from the smartphone at launch, the AI-powered personal assistant is finally landing on devices via a huge update, which will finally give everyone a sense (no puns!) of HTC's vision.

In our briefing with HTC, the company made no qualms about their staggered rollout of the AI assistant. It's implementation is less ambitious than the current generation of AI assistants. HTC supposedly prefers to improve its capabilities over time and has limited its functionality to just a few built-in apps, like contacts and calendar.

In practice, the Sense Companion turned out to be underwhelming for an assistant. It resembled Google Now more than Google Assistant, giving information in cards rather than being summoned by voice. Not that it would matter since the HTC Sense Companion doesn't do voice yet anyway. It remains to be seen if HTC's iterative development strategy will bear fruit, as this is the first major update it's pushed out for the HTC U Ultra, weeks after it launched in the market.

The huge update, which is about 640 MB heavy, also has some "System enhancements". HTC VP for Project Management Mo Versi hinted that those include bug fixes as well as additional features for the second screen. Considering the latter is a blatant rip off of the LG V20, it really has no other choice but to try and do better than LG.

SOURCE: @Mo Versi