A lot of questions were raised when HTC launched its HTC U Ultra, a premium smartphone powered by a Snapdragon 821, not the next-generation Snapdragon 835 in January this year. Now the Taiwanese smartphone maker has clarified the reason for not using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, which was only announced at CES 2017.
In an interview with Tbreak, HTC’s president of smartphones Chialin Chang confirmed Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 wasn’t ready at the time, and he doesn’t even expect any of the flagship phones with the latest processor to be announced at MWC 2017.
Clarifying why HTC has decided to announce the U Ultra in January instead of waiting for MWC 2017, Chang said: “When we will look back, it will be clear why HTC introduced [these new phones.] We want to have a couple of months of leadership before the next flagship CPU comes. But that will be in another period of time- not at MWC. Not for us or any other player”.
This means that we won’t see smartphones powered by a Snapdragon 835 processor at the Mobile World Congress, which will begin at the of February. So the G6 will likely to use the Snapdragon 821 SoC since it will be unveiled at MWC 2017.
The key reason behind the scarcity of a Snapdragon 835 chipset has something to do with Samsung. The Galaxy S8 maker is allegedly hoarding supply of Snapdragon 835 chipset and has first rights on the same, until the Galaxy S8 launch in April, according to a recent report on Forbes. Obviously this means other manufacturers, be it LG or HTC, have no choice but to wait for Samsung before they can launch their new devices with the SoC.
The report on TBreak further states that HTC will launch a new flagship smartphone as soon as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 becomes widely available. However, this will most certainly not happen until the second half of the year. “Every time there is a brand new CPU with power that we can leverage, we’re always at the forefront doing that. Some people are talking about the timing [of our release] but timing was determined 9 months ago,” added Chang.
Samsung has already confirmed the Galaxy S8 smartphone won’t be launched at MWC 2017, and this will likely be the first smartphone with the 835 SoC, although the India market usually gets the Exynos processor version.
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