A year ago I didn’t think it would be possible for HTC to choose anything than Qualcomm chips for their phones, but I think early this year they’ve started noticing that the Qualcomm chips are starting to fall behind the competition, and if they don’t choose other chips for their smartphones, Qualcomm might drag them down with them.
Since the buzz Tegra 3 was getting bigger and bigger about how they’ll have the first quad core mobile CPU, it was a natural move for HTC to try Tegra 3 for some of their next smartphones. It’s a shame that Nvidia had to delay the availability of their chip once again by a few months, otherwise we might’ve seen this phone, along with others, by Christmas this year. But now we’ll probably see them sometime in February or so.
The HTC Edge is supposed to feature a quad core 1.5 Ghz Tegra 3 chip, a 4.7″ HD display, which probably means it will come out directly with Android 4.0 on board, and at least 1 GB of RAM that should also be twice as fast than the RAM in HTC’s other devices. That’s because it needs to handle all the processing power of the quad core Tegra 3 chip.
It should also include the HTC Rezound’s Beats Audio, as well as its 28 mm f/2.2 8MP camera, 16-32 GB of internal storage, as well as a larger storage microSD, and last but not least, a LTE chip for fast Internet speeds on Verizon.
One thing that seems strange about this render is that it still has buttons, which shouldn’t really happen if it’s made directly for Android 4.0. Also it wouldn’t make sense for them to release such a powerful phone with a quad core chip, but still use a more than one year old version of Android. So is the render an inaccurate image of the device that will actually ship? Or did HTC plan on using buttons with Android 4.0? They would need to modify Android 4.0 quite a bit for that. But my guess is they plan on doing that anyway and put Sense 4.0 on it.
All these questions should be answered soon, as this is only just the first leak about it, and we should see more of them soon.