Last week’s teaser hinting at the upcoming announcement of HTC’s next Android flagship that’s widely believed to be the U12 Plus features parts from the iPhone 6 and several other Apple-made devices, according to smartphone repair service iFixit. Originally spotted by one AnandTech reader, the iPhone parts shown in the teaser image include the motherboard of the iPhone 6, with HTC confirming that was an intentional advertisement design choice. None of the components featured in the image come from the upcoming handset and are instead meant to represent “the jumble of parts (specs) that our competitors inelegantly cram into their phones,” a company spokesperson told CNET.
The choice of Apple’s components doesn’t fit that idea perfectly, with iPhones being widely considered as sporting some of the most elegantly arranged internals in the industry. HTC is advertising the upcoming device as “more than the sum of its specs” and centered its latest teaser around such a concept, though it’s presently unclear whether the U12 Plus is meant to feature stylistically arranged internals or if the message itself is only figurative. The vast majority of the firm’s previous Android smartphones lacked such aesthetically pleasing hardware, including Google’s Pixel 2 released last fall. The HTC U12 Plus is said to be the manufacturer’s only flagship of the year and no smaller HTC U12 is rumored to be in the works. The handset is expected to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chip and be offered in two variants, with the more premium version sporting 128GB of flash memory and 6GB of RAM, whereas the base model is likely to feature half of that storage space and 4GB of RAM.
A dual-camera setup is also likely to be part of the package, together with HTC’s custom implementation of Android 8.0 Oreo, as per previous rumors and leaks. The HTC U12 Plus is set to be officially announced on May 23 and should start retailing on a global level this summer. 2017 was the worst year in the history of the Taiwanese company which lost approximately $580 million over those twelve months as its smartphone sales continued their rapid decline.