HTC has had a turbulent year so far. Prior to the launch of the HTC One M9 in March, the rumors and speculation pegged the device as one which was going to land and land hard with top specs and a premium design. When the device was eventually unveiled, it did land with great specs and was a well-designed device, however, that did not stop the One M9 receiving wide criticism for being too similar to the HTC One M8. Not to mention the inclusion of the highly controversial Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor did not exactly help matters either.
As a result, the rest of the year has seen poor sales of the One M9, drops in HTC’s profits and even the recent claims that the company was planning on cutting as many as 15-percent of their workforce and also looking to diversify outside of smartphones. Away from the negatives, HTC has recently been trying to calm the storm by announcing that another premium device would come before the year is out. Since the, this next device has also seen a ton of speculation and rumors with some pointing towards a HTC Aero and sporting number of specs including the Snapdragon 810 again. Although, other rumors have pointed towards a refreshed HTC One M9 with a MediaTek processor inside.
Well, the latest coming through today suggests some very different details to what we have been hearing so far. Firstly, the latest rumors suggest that the new HTC device will be called the HTC O2 and will then see HTC moving away from their M flagship naming. The next discrepancy is that the HTC O2 will come sporting Qualcomm’s next generation processor, the Snapdragon 820. The rumor also states that this will be a quad-core (four custom ARM based Hydra cores) processor and not an octa-core processor and will make use of Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process. This leads to the final discrepancy which is the release date. While it had been thought that the next major flagship device from HTC would come around October, the very nature of this being a Snapdragon 820 powered device means that it is likely to be released until Q1 of next year.