HTC’s mid-range phone, the One S, is hitting the stores here on June 16. Sporting the Taiwanese phone maker’s familiar metallic design and with a dual-core processor, it will cost S$948 when bundled with the Beats Solo Headset. …

After a difficult 12 months, the Taiwanese phone maker is hoping to turn the next phone you buy this year into a real camera that can take pictures as you would on dedicated cameras, which can then be easily backed up over the Internet with cloud storage.

The cameras on its new HTC One series of high-end phones are tweaked to fire in 0.7 seconds, after auto-focusing on a subject in a short 0.2 seconds, say company representatives at the annual Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona today.

What’s more, like a real camera, the new phones are expected to fire multiple shots when you hold down the snap button. And just like high-end cameras now, the software onboard is able to let you select a frame from a shot video and save it as a still image.

The “hero” among the three phones featuring these new photo-friendly features is the HTC One X, which comes packed with all the goodies you’d expect from a phone this year. …