HTC M7 is supposedly HTC’s new flagship for this year. It’s going to be the HTC One X’s successor, which means HTC may have already scrapped the whole One series branding, and they might want to start from scratch again this year. That would put them further behind the branding of other companies such as Apple, Samsung, and even Sony (Xperia).
After starting the year pretty well with the One X branding, HTC quickly started demolishing that soon after, with all sorts of confusing letter combinations for their upcoming phones. This comes from the fact that HTC releases a lot of different models every year, and all the slightly different names end up confusing the potential customer who doesn’t know if the HTC One VX or the HTC SV is supposed to be better (the same way someone immediately knows iPhone 5 is better than 4S or Galaxy S4 is better than S3). Would it have killed HTC if they went with One X2 for the name?
Plus, this ends up with people having almost no expectation for next year’s HTC phones, because they really don’t know what to expect. With Apple and Samsung you always know there’s going to be a better iPhone, or a better Galaxy S next year. And you’re going to expect it, and maybe plan on buying it. That’s much less true with HTC, where a lot of people might not know whether the M7 is really the true next-gen successor of HTC One X, or just another phone in HTC’s line-up that they keep pumping into the market.
And speaking of the HTC M7 and its leaked image, I think the phone does look pretty good design wise, especially if it actually looks like that when the screen is on, with almost no bezel. However, I was hoping they’d start using more colors other than white and black (and sometimes red). I haven’t seen any blue phones from HTC in the Android market yet, and there should be some.
The rumored chip is most likely an overclocked S4 Pro at 1.7 Ghz, and with the same Adreno 320 GPU, as the next-gen Qualcomm Snapdragons won’t appear until the 2nd half of this year. That means that it should offer little improvement over a stock Android Nexus 4, that comes with a quad core 1.5 Ghz S4 Pro, and the same GPU, although in practice its GPU should be twice as fast the one in the M7 because the M7 is also going to use a 1080p resolution (at least for apps and games that intend to use its full resolution, and not just scale-up).
We’ll see if HTC has more tricks up its sleeve when the phone gets launched, but I think HTC’s innovative and successful days are long behind them. If HTC started using stock Android, they might actually light-up a spark in the community, but I don’t see them doing that anytime soon again, even though they seem all too happy to use the very stock WP8 OS, just like all the other WP8 manufacturers. HTC needs a radical change in thinking if they want the Android community to truly support them again, and going stock Android might be the change they need.