Last December we told you about HTC’s plan to release one to two mid-range phones a year powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 series of mid-range application processors (APs). This is disappointing for sure since there are many phone enthusiasts who would just love to see whether HTC could recapture some of the magic that made it arguably the first superstar Android smartphone designer.
I’ll say it right now with my hand on the Bible in front of any judge; my favorite smartphone of all time was the HTC One (M8) with its unibody aluminum build. This was a phone that looked different than anything that was available at the time (except for the HTC One Max, a phablet-sized version of the phone). But the HTC One (M8) was the peak and HTC either lost its mojo, sold its mojo, or had its mojo stolen.
On its Facebook page, HTC Taiwan has now teased a new phone that will be introduced on June 12th at 8 am Taiwan time (8 pm EDT). This could be the HTC U24 Pro, a picture of which was spotted in the Google Play Console in April and has yet to be officially announced. The device is believed to sport a display carrying a resolution of 1080 x 2436. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 mid-range AP will be under the hood and the device will sport 12GB of RAM.
HTC teases the upcoming introduction of the HTC U24 Pro
HTC, like LG before it, finally decided that it could not compete with Samsung in the flagship Android phone market and feels at home in the mid-range space. And that’s a shame. Many of you might be surprised to learn that certain memorable handsets from the early days of touchscreen mobile phones were built by HTC. For example, the very first Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, a Windows Mobile phone with a unique panels UI that foreshadowed the coming explosion in apps, was built by HTC.
HTC was also the company behind Google’s Nexus One Android phone and the very first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 (aka the HTC Dream). Personally, I’d love to see HTC take another whack at the flagship Android market. The last high-end HTC phone was the U12+ which was released in 2018 and did nothing to help the Taiwan-based company regain much of the relevance it lost when it stopped remembering how to design a great premium smartphone.