About a year ago the fact that HTC was facing serious financial problems was no longer a secret, and while the company is still not out of the woods (quite far from it, some would say), the success of this year’s HTC One has definitely helped. The third quarter of 2013 wasn’t very kind to the Taiwanese manufacturer, and HTC has recorded an all-time low for shipments during this period. Something must be done, and HTC needs to keep pushing forward. In other words, the company is expected to launch another flagship phone – a true HTC One successor, if you will. The HTC One max doesn’t count, since this particular handset is more of a niche device, and it’s also HTC’s first phablet.
Interestingly enough, rumors about a HTC One successor started surfacing as early as July, when the codename “M8″ made the headlines for a couple of days or so. Given the fact that the HTC One was originally known as the “M7,” many suspect that the M8 is the codename of a follow-up smartphone.
After a period of silence, the HTC M8 has recently begun to re-surface. This time around, rumors and reports have brought several interesting bits of information, including hardware specs. Let’s take a look at what we think we know about this mysterious flagship phone.
The First Leaks and Rumors
Those of you who are following the various mobile tech blogs out there should be familiar with @evleaks. The aforementioned twitter account is associated with one of the most famous sources of mobile-related leaks. Unsurprisingly, the first interesting leak surrounding the M8 came from none other than @evleaks, who claims that the HTC M8 will most likely hit the market with a new Sense user interface on-board: version 6.0.
Shortly after this bit of news made the rounds, a handful of photos depicting the back cover of an unknown HTC smartphone also hit the blogosphere. This time around, the photos were accompanied by speculations that the M8 will be equipped with a 5 / 5.2 inch display boasting a 2K resolution, a Snapdragon 800 processor and 3 GB of RAM. However, the mysterious device shown in these photos looks a lot like the HTC One, except for a few barely noticeable dissimilarities. As is the case with these kind of unofficial photos, we can’t be sure whether or not they are genuine or not.
Specs Revealed Through Benchmark Website
After a couple of leaks and rumors that haven’t really revealed a whole lot about the fabled HTC One successor, the M8 made a strong comeback just a couple of days ago. A HTC device bearing the model number “0P6B120″ appeared in AnTuTu, revealing a Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 quad-core SoC clocked at 2.3 GHz.
The handset in question scored roughly 36,500 points, which puts it in the same bracket as most flagship smartphones that are currently available on the market, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 or the LG G2.
One day later, the HTC M8 made yet another comeback in AnTuTu, this time revealing a whole lot more than an odd model number.
According to the website, the HTC M8 features a Snapdragon MSM8974AB processor clocked at 2.26 GHz and an Adreno 330 graphics chip. We should note that the “8974AB” CPU is an updated variant of the Snapdragon 800 that hit the market earlier this year. It can be clocked up to 2.4 GHz; the GPU frequency is set to 550 MHz instead of 450, while the frequency of the RAM is clocked at 933 MHz instead of 800 MHz. There are also 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of on-board storage.
Aside from these details, the AnTuTu page shows that the HTC M8 features a 5-inch display. However, the resolution is apparently set at 1920 x 1080, so the speculations surrounding a 2K screen have taken a big hit.
In the media department, the handset appears to feature a 4 MP main shooter that most likely uses a similar UltraPixel technology as the HTC One, while on the front panel resides a 2.1 MP camera.
Last but certainly not least, the device seems to run on Android 4.4 KitKat, which could explain the high benchmark scores. However, given the fact that the smartphone will probably go on sale with HTC Sense 6 out of the box, most of the Android 4.4 visuals will be replaced by whatever the latest version of Sense will bring to the table.
All in all, HTC is definitely cooking something, but remember that, despite the intensity of these leaks, nothing is set in stone until HTC makes it official. Given HTC’s history, the device will most likely be unveiled sometime in late Q1 or early Q2 2014.
Until then, we invite you to share your thoughts about the HTC M8 by leaving a comment below. If the aforementioned hardware specs are correct, do you think the M8 will be a worthy successor of the One?
Vlad Andrici is editor for gforgames.com and writes about technology issues. Follow Vlad on Google Plus.