HTC has had a few tough years after being the darling of the Android ecosystem early on. Things started to turn around in 2014 as the company turned its first profit in some time, but this year will make or break the company. The key to HTC’s continued existence is the 2015 flagship Android phone, currently known as the M9 or “Hima.” There have been a few leaks of this device’s specs, and now the device itself appears to have broken cover.
The new hardware leak comes courtesy of nowhereelse.fr, which has a solid track record of getting device hardware ahead of time. Most of the devices leaked by this site are assembled from OEM parts, but lack the internals. That’s probably the case with the M9 leak, but the specs have been leaked a number of times already.
What we see here is a device very much like other recent HTC phones with an aluminum unibody design and big front-facing BoomSound speakers. It looks a little less rounded than the HTC One M8 was, but not as angular as the M7. There’s one notable departure from the M8 on the back of this phone — the camera. Specifically, there’s only one of them.
Based on past leaks, it sounds like the M9 will be using a single 20MP image sensor. The M8 famously stuck with the 4MP Ultrapixel sensor from the 2013 M7 and added a second low-resolution camera to create photos with adjustable depth of field (HTC called this the Duo Camera). However, it wasn’t really doing post-capture focusing like Lytro offers on its devices. It was only a post-processing effect using depth data from that second camera.
The Duo Camera was not received very well, especially considering the results if produced weren’t much better than phones that did the same thing without a second camera module. At only 4MP, you really didn’t have any space pixels for cropping either. In the new leaked images, we see a single camera module on the back, which could mean a better overall photo taking experience.
Most flagship phones are racing to integrate 1440p displays, but multiple sources say the new HTC One will stick with a five-inch 1080p LCD. For a lot of users, a five-inch phone is a great size for one-handed use. It can even feel tiny after using a larger phone like the iPhone 6 Plus or Nexus 6. The advantage of using a 1080p panel is that battery performance will be much better. A device like the LG G3 has great standby time, but as soon as that 1440p LCD comes on, it starts guzzling electrons like no one’s business.
HTC’s new flagship is expected to launch with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 and 3GB of RAM. The 810 is a 64-bit chip with four Cortex-A57 and four A53 ARM cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. There have been reports that Qualcomm is having overheating issues with this chip, which could push back product launches. They don’t have a ton of time to figure it out — the M9 is expected to be announced on March 1st at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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