Things are not good for HTC, as their market value has been rapidly declining, their shares worth are seeing considerable debate – in August, their market value was below 1.5 billion USD, against a 27.5 billion value in 2011. The gold rush for smartphone makers is in China now, and we have been hearing rumors that the Taiwanese smartphone maker is about to unveil two new high-end devices next week during an event on September 29th. To add to the rumors, a Twitter post by @LlabTooFeR, says that the company will be launching two devices specifically for the Asian market. The phones that we might see are an updated HTC M9+, codenamed “Hima_Ultra_R1”, and a Butterfly 3 device for the Chinese market.
If you are unfamiliar with it, the colorful HTC Butterfly 3 (or J Butterfly) is a very powerful and good-looking device launched a few months ago and available in some Asian countries. Its hardware is somewhat between the HTC One M9 and the M9+, with a high resolution (2560 x 1440 pixels) 5.2-inch screen, a Snapdragon 810 SoC by Qualcomm, 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. The cameras are also huge – a 20-megapixel sensor on the rear and a 13-megapixel shooter for selfies. Another great feature is the fact that the phone is waterproof. According to a source on Twitter, the company will unveil a special version for China, but there is little information on what HTC has planned for it. A huge trend in Chinese smartphone makers is to bring their devices with a MediaTek processor instead of the Snapdragon from Qualcomm, so, who knows?
The HTC One M9+ is a bigger and faster sibling of the One M9, featuring a 5.2-inch screen with 2K resolution, an octa-core MediaTek Helio X10 processor that runs at 2.2 GHz, 3 GB of RAM, a 20-megapixel rear camera with the same Duo-lens arrangement we had on the M8 and an UltraPixel front-facing camera. The phone also features a fingerprint reader on the bottom. The rumors say that an updated version of this phone might be announced soon, dubbed “Hima_Ultra_R1”. The original HTC One M9 was codenamed “Hima”, and the One M9+, “Hima Ultra”. There are several things that can be upgraded on this phone, most notably the processor, as MediaTek already has the powerful deca-core Helio X20 SoC that also allows more RAM. Again, these are currently just rumors and therefore, should be taken with a grain of salt. Anyways, next Tuesday, September 29th is right around the corner and it will take just a week before all is known.