When it comes to a Nexus device it seems to never be too early to start speculating on what the next handset will bring. In last year’s case, it was two handsets, and this year is rumored to be the same with HTC as the manufacturer. Currently there is no official details to confirm that HTC will be the OEM who makes the Nexus smartphone or smartphones this year, but some newly leaked specs of an unreleased Nexus 6P have just shown up on Geekbench which suggests it will be coming powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and that it will come with 4GB of RAM.
Following the rumor from earlier on this year which suggested that HTC would be the next company to build a Nexus device, a new rumor from this morning reiterates that HTC will be producing the Nexus this year, but that they will also be developing a second Nexus handset, both of which are rumored to be running on Android N, Google’s next version of Android which is currently in developer preview status. Another rumor which has just surfaced today states that HTC’s upcoming Nexus smartphones will be referred to as M1 and S1, with codenames Marlin and Sailfish. It’s worth mentioning that each and every Nexus device ever produced has always had a codename that relates to a particular type of fish, just like Google uses dessert names to refer to each new Android OS version.
The Geekbench score for the “Google Nexus 6P” this year makes a reference to the name “Marlin” next to the motherboard listing which matches up with the recently rumored codename of at least one of the devices, and judging by the specification hardware as well as the Nexus 6P in the name (the Nexus 6P was 2015’s high-end Nexus handset) it’s likely that Marlin is to be the higher-end model of the two. Also displayed in the Geekbench score is Android N for the version of the platform that is running on this device shown. Each new Nexus smartphone usually comes running on the latest version of the software, so it makes sense to see a potential new Nexus listed with this version of the platform on board during benchmark testing. According to this leaked test score, the 2016 Google Nexus 6P received a single-core score of 2115 compared to the single-core score of 1346 from the Huawei Nexus 6P launched last Fall, while the multi-core score for this new model comes in at 4903, sitting just above the multi-core score of 4833 from the Huawei Nexus 6P.