The HTC U12 Plus Android flagship will start at approximately $750 in the company’s home country of Taiwan, according to a new rumor from the Far East. The price of the base model has been placed in the range between $735 and $770, whereas the more premium variant of the phablet is said to cost from $800 to $835, i.e. the New Taiwan dollar equivalents of those figures. The two handsets will differ in terms of storage space, offering 64GB and 128GB of flash memory, respectively, though it’s still unclear whether they’ll also mimic last year’s HTC U11 Plus lineup whose two variants had different RAM configurations – 4GB and 6GB.
Most recent benchmark sightings of possible HTC U12 Plus models mentioned 6GB of RAM, though many industry watchers are still predicting the base variant of the phablet to offer a 4GB setup. The two devices should otherwise be identical, featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chip and a dual-camera setup entailing at least one 12.2-megapixel sensor with an f/1.8 lens. The high-end lineup is expected to launch in four colors – black, red, violet, and translucent. The U12 Plus is understood to be HTC’s only flagship bet of the year and no smaller U12 model is being planned, industry sources claimed earlier this year.
The latest leak points to the HTC U12 Plus having an international price that’s comparable to that of the U11 Plus, at least when accounting for the fact that the company’s offerings are always somewhat more expensive abroad, and industry insider Roland Quandt also said yesterday that neither model will be “cheap.” The newly rumored pricing puts the upcoming Android flagship in the same price bracket that’s currently occupied by Samsung’s Galaxy S9 lineup, Huawei’s P20 series, and is also likely to host the recently announced LG G7 ThinQ set to be released by June. The Taiwanese company will be announcing its next Android flagship on May 23 and is presently teasing it via a campaign that includes iPhone parts, among other mobile components. HTC recently endured the worst period in its 20-year history, having lost $580 million in 2017 due to declining handset sales and the fact that its VR investments are yet to start generating significant returns.