HTC One Developer Edition Will Jump Straight To Android 4.3

The HTC One Developer Edition that's the developer-friendly, 64-gigabyte model sold directly by HTC  will skip Android 4.2.2 and go directly to Android 4.3, according Jason Mackenzie, president of global sales at HTC. Mackenzie was responding to questions on Twitter when he dropped the word.

The reason, Mackenzie said, is that Android 4.2.2 " is a minor update, so we decided to go straight to 4.3."

Some non U.S. versions of the HTC One have been updated to Android 4.2.2, which in addition to the core Android improvements brought new features to BlinkFeed and Video Highlights.

The next question is whether the U.S. carrier branded versions of the HTC One which launched earlier this year with Android 4.1.2 will go the same route and update directly to the newest version of Android,which was released just last month.

HTC One Developer Edition To Launch On April 19th

HTC announce the HTC One Developer Edition last month. HTC already revealed the unlocked One with 64GB of memory would retail for $649, but we didn’t know exactly when it would go on sale. Today I bumped into the HTC team at the Facebook event and they were nice enough to confirm the launch date.

An HTC spokesperson said, “The HTC One developer edition will be available for pre-order in the coming days through www.HTC.com and will be available for sale starting on April 19th.”

The HTC One Developer Edition will support all the 2G/3G/4G/LTE bands of AT&T, but it should also work on T-Mobile. When it comes to HSPA+ the device supports 850/1900/2100 MHz. T-Mobile mainly uses 1700 MHz for their HSPA+ network, but they have been refarming their network to support 1900 MHz in select cities. Sightings of T-Mobile’s 1900 MHz network can be found at Airportal.de.

When it comes to LTE, the device supports 700/850/AWS/1900 MHz (US). T-Mobile is rolling out LTE on AWS bands and we believe the Developer Edition should support it, but we are still waiting on final confirmation. We have reached out to HTC to see if the device will support T-Mobile LTE and we will update this post when we get an answer.

I don’t know how big the demand will be for the HTC One Developer Edition, but I plan on buying one just to support devices that are SIM and bootloader unlocked.