HTC One 2 To Be Released In 2014
HTC’s flagship smartphone, the HTC One was very well received for its good performance and its improved user experience, especially when compared to other HTC devices. Having been universally praised it is the company’s most successful smartphone in the past years and everybody expects a follow-up smartphone for this year’s flagship. We now know when HTC will launch the next HTC One smartphone as a negligent patent judge from the United Kingdom revealed that HTC will release the HTC One 2 in early 2014.
Richard Arnold is the judge that granted Nokia’s request for a judicial decision against HTC for patent infringement, requiring that HTC stops HTC One Mini shipments in the United Kingdom by December 6th. In his decision, Richard Arnold wrote that Nokia provided evidence that the Taiwanese company is going to release the HTC One 2 (which is rumored to have the code name HTC M8) during the first quarter of next year.
HTC did not dispute Nokia’s request due to patent infringement, which prompted judge Richard Arnold to conclude that the claim is valid so he assumed that the HTC One flagship (which was not banned from sale in the United Kingdom right away) will indeed get a successor that will ship during the the first quarter of 2014, probably at the end of February or in the first half of March.
As mentioned, the second generation HTC One has the code name HTC M8 and it will include mostly similar hardware to what we can find in the HTC One and other models in the One line. If we were to guess, we would say the second generation HTC One will be equipped with a quad core 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 System on Chip, the latest mobile OS from Google, Android 4.4 KitKat with the latest version of HTC’s user interface (HTC Sense 6.0) on top of it, a 5 inch display capable of a Full High Definition resolution (1080p), a 4 MP UltraPixel rear camera and a 2.1 MP front facing camera sensor. The HTC One 2 (M8) would also probably have 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage.
The Taiwanese company is not allowed to ship either of its new releases in the HTC One line (these being the HTC One Mini and the HTC One Max) in the United Kingdom market. The HTC Windows Phone 8X and the HTC Windows Phone 8S, both running the Windows Phone mobile OS are also banned from the UK market. With the HTC One things are different: while the company’s flagship also infringes on Nokia’s patent, it was designed before HTC was notified about the patent infringement so the Taiwanese company was allowed to sell the HTC One in the United Kingdom until Friday December 6th.
Back in 1999 Nokia issued a European patent about mobile chips that are used in communication; this patent is behind the recent HTC ban. Two years ago, Nokia sued Apple over the same patent infringement but the Finnish company settled with Apple the same year. The same situation happened with BlackBerry which Nokia also sued for the infringing the 1999 patent; as with Apple, BlackBerry also settled with Nokia.
After the recent judicial decision against HTC, Nokia issued an official statement saying that the company was “pleased that the U.K. high court has imposed an injunction on certain HTC products […] Pending the appeal, HTC has undertaken not to ship any more of the infringing products into the U.K., except the HTC One, which it may continue to sell until the conclusion of any appeal. If HTC does not succeed on appeal, the injunction will take effect on all infringing products“.
