HTC Silently Announces New Phablet Sized Devices — HTC One E9+ And HTC One E9


Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has silently announced the launch of two new phablet-sized devices that seem to be directed at the Asian and Chinese markets, reports DailyTech. The new devices that had been rumored for some time now include the HTC One E9+ and its slightly lower end variant, the HTC One E9 (without the “+”).

The HTC E9 series, as you might be already aware, are phablet-sized devices — making them larger than the HTC M9. Both HTC E9 variants sport a 5.5 inch display. The HTC E9+, however, sports a QHD display, which might be a good enough reason to consider an upgrade to that model. The HTC M9 and the HTC E9 both remain restricted to full HD displays. Both the new HTC models sport a plastic/metal hybrid unibody design.

Now, instead of the usual Qualcomm chipset that you were expecting this phone to be powered with, the HTC E9+ packs in a different beast altogether. Taking care of the number crunching and processing department is the MediaTek MT6795 SoC. While MediaTek is known for its low-cost SoC offerings, the MT6795 is not your usual low-end chip. Powered by four ARM Cortex-A57 cores, each clocked at 2.0 GHz alongside four other Cortex-A53 cores, the MediaTek MT6795 is a 64-bit ready, octa-core beast of an SoC that in several benchmarks outshines the Snapdragon 810. It is also believed to have a graphics engine powered by a PowerVR G6200 chipset. To complement all this firepower, the HTC E9+ also gets 3 GB of DDR3 RAM as well as 32 GB of on-board storage. The phone sports a microSD card slot and can support cards up to 128 GB capacity.

The HTC One E9+ gets a 20-megapixel main camera for your primary photographic needs. For selfie freaks, there is the 4-megapixel UltraPixel camera at the front. The main camera also gets an LED flash for low light imaging. As for the lower end variant of the E9, it is expected to get only 16 GB of on-board memory, a 13-megapixel main camera, and 2 GB of RAM. The HTC One E9+ supports LTE networks, and like several other handsets designed for the Asian markets, is a dual SIM handset.

HTC has not revealed the prices of these new offerings from them. It is also unclear if these phones would ever be sold outside Asia. It would, however, not be surprising if HTC does come up with something similar for the U.S. and the European markets to compete with the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and the Samsung Galaxy Note series. What do you think?

[Images via DailyTech]

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