HTC‘s One was one of the Ausdroid team’s favourite handsets of 2013 with its sharp full HD screen, “BoomSound” front-facing speakers and the “Ultrapixel” camera that finally delivered a camera that performed well in low-light situations, albeit 4 MP at a time.
As we approach the end of the year, we’re starting to see information released (or “leaked”, if you prefer) for its successor. AnTuTu is reporting that a device identified as htc_m8-userdebug|4.4|KRT16O has shown up in the AnTuTu database.
The device in question seems to have been turning in some impressive results:
The device specifications, from AnTuTu’s report:
- Snapdragon 800 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU
- 4 MP rear-facing camera, 2.1 MP front
- 1080p Full HD resolution
- 2 GB RAM
- 16 GB storage
- Android 4.4
Some of this isn’t too surprising – the Snapdragon 800 CPU is an obvious step up from the One’s Snapdragon 600 (indeed, some notable devices have already launched with it, and 2 GB of RAM is pretty much a given for most top-end Android devices these days.
Last week, a tweet from @evleaks suggested that the Full HD screen would graduate to 5 inches, a slight increase over the current One’s 4.7 inches. HTC may be looking to pull off the same trick that LG and Samsung have performed over the course of 2013 – a larger screen in the same-size device – if it does some work to reduce the One’s admittedly fairly large bezels that surround its screen. If not, they’ll run the risk of blurring the lines between the just-released One Max and its smaller brethren.
Another point of contention is the camera – today’s leak suggests that the company will use the same camera in its 2014 flagship. While the One’s camera focused on low-light performance with its larger-than-average “Ultrapixels”, I found it disappointing if I needed to zoom into a photo that might not have been perfectly framed, or if I needed to crop something in the distance of a shot. Low-light performance and optical image stabilisation are great, but 4 megapixels is still 4 megapixels. This is a point of contention — HTC believes most users don’t zoom into photos taken on their device. Hopefully they’re still working on the next Ultrapixel camera, and it’s just not in the test device yet – I’d like to see them move this technology forward in 2014.
Finally, we’ve got to wonder what everyone else is wondering but is afraid to ask — what’s the device going to be called? HTC’s used the “One” moniker in various forms over the past couple of years. Maybe it’s time for a new, less-confusing name?
We may not have long to wait to find the answers to these questions – still more rumours point to an early 2014 announcement from HTC.
Are you interested in HTC’s 2014 flagship, whatever it’ll be called? Got any ideas on a name? What would you like to see in the device? Let us know in the comments!
