HTC 10 will be launched in India sometime around the middle of next month and will carry an market operating price of around Rs 40,000-42,000, according to distributor sources.
The pricing will make the phone, also known as HTC M10, the cheapest flagship launched by the Taiwnese company in India and is sure to hot up the competition in the high end market.
Last year, HTC launched the M9+ at a whopping Rs 53,000, though the effective price came to only Rs 49,990 when the handset began selling.
This year too, the sticker price will be somewhere below the Rs 45,000 mark, but the phone will be available at around Rs 40-42k, according to distributors.
Unlike last year’s 5.5-inch model, the HTC 10 will have a smaller 5.2-inch display. This will make it a direct competitor to the Samsung Galaxy S7, which was unveiled two weeks ago with a tag of Rs 48,000 in India.
Despite being cheaper by around 6,000-8,000, the M10 will be comparable to Samsung S7 in nearly every way as HTC too is reportedly going for an AMOLED display this time. UPDATE: It won’t be an AMOLED panel, but an LCD one with 4 mln pixels.
OTHER SPECIFICATIONS OF HTC 10
The Taiwanese company has not officially given out the specifications of its upcoming flagship, but ‘leaks’ have pointed to 32 GB of internal storage, iPhone-like appearance, all-metal build, a 12 MP Ultrapixel camera, chipped edges, Snapdragon 820 chipset paired with 4 GB of DDR4 RAM.
The phone has been reported to score 156,000 in Antutu benchmarks, which is about 21,000 points higher than Samsung Galaxy S7.
One of the biggest changes in the 10 will be appearance. HTC has been holding on to a particular styling for its flagship phones for the last three years, and each successive generation — whether the M8, M9 or M9+ — looked more or less the same.
While the look was much appreciated, especially when it was introduced, the lack of change had begun to make the M series rather boring in terms of appearance.
That will finally be resolved with the M10 (or 10, as it is likely to be called).
The new phone looks a bit like its biggest competitor, Galaxy S7, from the front. The primary reason for the change in appearance is HTC’s decision to do away with the two-speaker system on front. The bottom speaker has been moved to the edge or bottom grille (see the picture above.)
This makes the HTC 10 very different compared to its predecessors and more like other phones. With the speaker gone, HTC has also integrated a fingerprint sensor into the home button.
Similarly, the front view is now more ’rounded’ and curvy instead of flat, while the backside — which used to be cylindrical in appearance — is now much flatter.
Another design change that the space-conscious will appreciate is the removal of the on-screen ‘soft buttons’ (back, menu and home). The back and menu buttons are placed on either side of the physical home button, saving a lot of space. The HTC logo under the screen is also much smaller, giving the phone a cleaner, more refined look.
From the leaked photos (including the one from Evan Blass above), it looks like the HTC 10 will come with a USB Type C reversible port.
The HTC 10 is a crucial product for its maker as the Taiwanese brand has been struggling in India — and the world over — for almost a year now.
While its Desire series was the first to bring features such as 4G LTE into the mid-range market, the India has seen a revolution of sorts in 2015 with the entry of low-priced competition from Chinese vendors like LeTV and Lenovo.
As a result, sales of HTC’s mainstay in the country — the Desire 800 series — has been majorly impacted.
The high-end market is the only one where the Chinese players are not a big threat, and it is here that HTC can hope to remain competitive in India.
Meanwhile, Sony will also release its new series of Xperia phones next month. These will include the Xperia Z6, M6 and so on. However, the launches are expected to take place only in the second half of April.