HTC was once the preeminent Android smartphone vendor, but the days of the Evo and the Hero are now just a distant memory. Samsung’s Galaxy S-series has shrunk the Taiwanese company’s market share at the premium end, while the torrent of Chinese vendors with competitively-priced devices at the mid and entry-level segments have meant that HTC has become one of the also-rans in an industry it helped establish. The company has been losing a great deal of money from its smartphone business over the past several quarters, but that doesn’t mean it is giving up on its smartphone ambitions just as yet. That being the case, HTC is expected to announce an all new mid-range smartphone at the CES trade show next month in Las Vegas, Nevada.
That’s according to various rumors in the online tech media, which seemingly suggests that the upcoming handset will be a follow-up to last year’s HTC X9, and will be marketed as the HTC X10. The device has been reported to have received clearance from a Russian regulatory agency recently, and is expected to be launched fairly soon after its official unveiling at the CES 2017. While many of the key hardware specs of the upcoming smartphone has already been rumored strongly by various sources, what we now have are a few live images that are said to be of the upcoming device. The images, which can be seen in the gallery below, suggest a fairly standard HTC smartphone that’s expected to sport a price-tag of 2,000 Yuan (around $300) in China.
According to earlier rumors, the HTC X10 will feature a 5.5-inch 1080p display and will be powered by a MediaTek P10 SoC. The device will reportedly come with 3GB of RAM and a 13-megapixel primary camera that’s expected to be accompanied by OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). While the device will reportedly run Android 7.0 Nougat out-of the-box, there’s one persistent rumor that may well be a cause for concern for some. According to media reports, the HTC X10 will lack a fingerprint scanner, which would certainly be a glaring omission at that price. In a day and age when even $100 smartphones from established vendors are starting to feature biometric sensors of some sort, it will be interesting to see how the HTC X10 will compete in the market, if indeed, it comes without the much-wanted feature.
