After Google announced the Galaxy S4 with stock Android experience, today HTC has joined them by announcing the HTC One with stock Google experience slated for June 26th release in the US which is the same day when Galaxy S4 version comes out with stock Android experience there. The unlocked phone is priced at $599 and will be sold only through the Google Play store, which makes it $50 cheaper than the $649 Google is asking for the Galaxy S4 version. Not bad considering its the same hardware as the regular HTC One.
The news came from Google’s Android chief Sundar Pichai on stage at the D11 conference and HTC followed it up with a tweet saying “The #HTCOne comes in a new flavor: Vanilla”. So what do you get?? Android 4.2.2 straight from Google with updates coming directly from them, 32GB storage, an unlocked bootloader and LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile. Sense is gone though, so no BlinkFeed or the Zoe camera stuff. Beats Audio stays in as a hardware thing but the logo on screen wont be there.
Pichai also said the Nexus program will continue, so we will still see proper Nexus phones along with these. Its US only for now, so nothing for us here in India or UAE yet. We’ll keep you posted.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: allthingsd.com, engadget.com, droid-life.com, gsmarena.com, techcrunch.com.
