HTC J Butterfly Announced by Japan's KDDI, Packs LTE-A Carrier Aggregation

From DailyTech: Japan's KDDI Corp. (TYO:9433) is currently stuck in third place, having been for the moment passed by Softbank Corp. (TYO:9984). Softbank has 30.3 percent (as of Feb. 2014) of the mobile market in Japan (via its SoftBank, eMobile/eAccess, Willcom, Wireless City Planning (WCP) brands). KDDI has 28.9 percent of the market via its au, Okinawa Wireless, and UQ Communications brands. Both trail market leader NTT Docomo Inc. (TYO:9437) which controls a whopping 40.8 percent of Japanese connections.

The fierce competition on the high-tech island nation has led to great high-end handsets. KDDI was pleased this week to announce that it would be carrying the HTC Corp. (TPE:2498) 2014 J Butterfly. It did not indicate whether its deal to carry the device was exclusive.

The HTC J Butterfly is the latest in a series of high-end handsets from HTC that have made it a serious contender in Japan.

The HTC Butterfly J (HTL23) continues in the line of the Butterfly S, incorporating features from the same-year U.S. HTC One model (this time the 2014 HTC One M8), while improving the spec somewhat.

Clearly the star of the show is the advanced wireless technologies onboard the Japanese HTC One M8 variant. Japan is among the most advanced nations in the push for LTE-A, and KDDI is on the forefront of this push. It's making clever use of its adjacent 2 GHz spectrum as WiMax 2+ for slightly higher throughput on a single antenna, when the 800 MHz band isn't available for aggregation. When the 800 MHz and 2.1 GHz band are available, it can go even faster via aggregating the two downlinks.

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