HTC 10 Lifestyle discovered: Could HTC have a water-resistant smartphone in store?
The HTC 10 is all scheduled for an announcement tomorrow, April 12th, and the Taiwanese manufacturer has been doing all it can to hype its smartphone because it’s aware of the competition and what its rivals, Samsung and LG, have done already. While we’ve seen the device’s front and back, there’s a new smartphone that we haven’t seen yet — what could be a second HTC smartphone revealed on tomorrow.
The source says that a camera named “HTC 10 Lifestyle” has been spotted in the exif data of a camera shot taken from someone at Google+ and posted on social media, leading some to believe this is a second smartphone that could be water and dust resistant. “Lifestyle,” of course, implies that this smartphone would be for those who lead an active lifestyle, but we’ve had little in the way to establish this. After all, the “HTC 10 Lifestyle” moniker is found in the camera section of the screenshot. So, the person taking the photo could’ve been using the HTC 10 Lifestyle camera instead — which would make more sense given that the name was found in the camera details.
We don’t know if this is actually a second smartphone at all, but it is interesting to see the camera name “HTC 10 Lifestyle” in place. Perhaps HTC has decided to rename its camera from something like “UltraPixel” to “lifestyle” for marketing purposes (your camera is your life companion, to use a familiar line from Samsung), or the Lifestyle camera could be something akin to an accessory for professional photographers to match what Samsung provided at its own Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge announcement back in mid-February. HTC has promised a world-best camera, and, despite the fact we think it farfetched at this point, seeing will be believing, no doubt.
The announcement is all set to bring the specs and features we’ve already seen: the device’s 5.2-inch display with a Quad HD screen resolution, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 5MP front camera (made by Samsung, interestingly enough) and a 12MP back camera utilizing Sony’s IMX377 sensor. The device was codenamed “Perfume” but will only run Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box. The HTC 10 moniker has also been listed at the company’s website, confirming what we’ve known for weeks now — that HTC would remove the “One” moniker and just stick with the number “10” (#powerof10, remember the hashtag?).
As has been said before, the announcement doesn’t look set to bring much, but announcements can always hide a surprise or two, right? Well, for now, hope will have to do.