Now that we’re in the new year, we can expect the rumor mills to start churning a little harder to crank out some freshly mint rumors about all of the flagship devices from the top mobile device OEM’s. Take for instance the recent rumors about the HTC One M8 successor also being referred to as HTC Hima for the codename, that state we could see the device come packed with 3GB of RAM, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 CPU backed by an Adreno 420 GPU for the graphics processing, and a 5-inch display.(Hopefully the display is a little bigger than 5-inches)
The latest rumor suggests that while the U.S. model(and maybe other regions?)may be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset, the Chinese model may well be powered by the SoC technology provided by MediaTek. Now, MediaTek has been gaining some good ground over the last year, not just in mobile devices like smartphones, but also tablets, TV’s, you name it. This year even they’re slated to be powering a selection of speakers running on the Google Cast for audio software and Android TV powered TV’s from top brands like Sony and others. So, it shouldn’t be too outlandish to think that they could be the company set aside for the CPU makeup in the Chinese model of the next HTC flagship. HTC is a Taiwanese manufacturer after all too, and using a Taiwanese branded SoC OEM makes a decent bit of sense for a model released in that region. Not to mention MediaTek would likely help them save costs compared to Qualcomm.
The rumor comes from the Chinese media news site The China Times, who makes a strong claim apparently that the HTC Hima device will be powered by MediaTek for the Chinese model, and as HTC has already done something like this(split two model variations between Qualcomm and MediaTek)with the HTC Desire 820 there’s no reason to doubt they could decide to do the same with their flagship high-end phone. MediaTek is a rather popular SoC brand in Asia and according to the media outlet that is making these claims, HTC may have decided in part to go with MediaTek due to some overheating issues that the Snapdragon 810 was having, although Qualcomm of course says claims of overheating are untrue. Whatever the case may be, if HTC has decided to go with MediaTek for the CHinese model of Hima and Qualcomm on other models, it will be interesting to see how they compare to each other.