HTC shocked a lot of people at Mobile World Congress – and not in a good way. They decided not to compete with Samsung and LG at the show this year by announcing their flagship as well. Instead, they are opting to announce the device a bit later (rumors and reports have stated that an event will take place some time in March). It’s still a bit of a gamble, seeing as the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge both come out on March 11th, and the LG G5 will be out in early April. But this is HTC’s plan and they are sticking with it.
One of the complaints that reviewers and even users, have had with the recent crop of HTC One M-series smartphones, is the camera. The One M7 featured a 4MP UltraPixel camera, which on paper sounded like a good idea. Considering the UltraPixel camera had a larger sensor, meaning more light can get in. However the low megapixel count meant that zooming was a nightmare. In the One M8, HTC debuted their duo-camera. Where we had again the 4MP UltraPixel camera along with a secondary 2MP camera above it. Many people weren’t very impressed with it. In 2015, HTC decided to go all out and throw in a 21MP camera. However they choose an unproven sensor, from Toshiba (which was their first smartphone sensor), and it didn’t perform as well as it should. Now, HTC executives – most notably Chialin Chang who is the company’s Chief Financial Officer, has stated that the camera on their upcoming flagship will offer a “compelling camera experience”. Chang stated this after seeing what LG and Samsung brought to the market at Mobile World Congress this week.
With this upcoming flagship, HTC is at a make or break situation. As their last few flagship devices haven’t performed well in the market. After returning to profitability in 2014 with the One M8, they began getting back into the red in 2015 with the One M9. In fact, sales revenue was down 35% for 2015. That’s a huge drop for HTC, and they are going to need to do something big to turn things around with the HTC One M10.
Rumors for the One M10 state that we’ll see a 5.2-inch QHD display (that’s a 2560×1440 resolution), that display is also slated to be an AMOLED one. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. It will also feature a microSD cards lot. These specs are pretty similar to the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 Edge and LG G5 announced earlier this week. On the camera side, however, they are going back to the UltraPixel route. Bringing a 12-megapixel sensor to the One M10, rumors are pointing at it being the same sensor as the Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6P. Which is the Sony IMX377.
So far, there’s no confirmed event for the announcement of the HTC One M10. However, where they have already started to tease the announcement, the invites should be hitting our inbox pretty soon for this event.