Category: HTC U11

Good news for those of you who have the HTC U11 on Sprint here in the United States.  The Android Oreo update for the phone will start rolling out tomorrow according to HTC’s Mo Versi.

Sprint HTC u11 owners! Appreciate your patience, we have received technical approval from the carrier. Updates to Oreo OS will start on Monday! Enjoy!

— Mo Versi (@moversi) January 20, 2018

This announcement follows up the November 2017 release of the build for the unlocked variant of the phone.

The unlocked variant of the HTC U11 here in the United States has a new update rolling out starting today.  The update is build 2.42.617.1 for those keeping score and brings the December 2017 Android Security Update patch to the phone along with other system improvements.  The update is just over 730MB in size so users will need to download it via WiFi before installing it.

HTC highlighted in the release note the December Android Security Update patch but everything else in the note falls under “system enhancements”.  No details are given on what exactly was enhanced but given the size of the download, it is likely a significant number of fixes and performance improvement tweaks to the phone.

For those of you who have the HTC U11, there is good news this morning.  The company has begun rolling out their Android Oreo update to the phone but, for now, it is only in Taiwan.  The update to the company’s home country is likely their version of “phasing” meaning that they are going to make sure that the update performs as expected before rolling out globally.

Assuming that everything goes smooth in Taiwan, you can expect the roll out of Oreo to the U11 to happen globally pretty quickly.

As for the update itself, it is big at 1.3GB which is not uncommon for major version changes in Android.  The update also has the November Android Security Updates baked in, has support for Voice over WiFi.  In Taiwan, VoWiFi is only support with Chunghwa Telecom so it isn’t clear if this will be available on the likes of T-Mobile when the upgrade comes to devices in the US.

HTC has been one of the better manufactures at keeping their devices up to date with both security and major updates of Android.  It looks like with Android Oreo, they are going to try to keep that trend going.

In a Tweet earlier this afternoon, HTC’s USA Twitter account has indicated that the U11 will be the first phone from the Taiwanese manufacture to get Oreo and it will be at some point in Q4.

We’re excited to bring Android 8.0 to the HTC U11, U Ultra, & 10, beginning with U11 in Q4. Stay tuned for more Oreo details & new products! pic.twitter.com/B2Os1tOONP

— HTC USA (@HTCUSA) August 24, 2017

While Q4 2017 is a big window of time, it is still good to see that HTC being up front with their customers to let them know when to roughly expect the update.