HTC One 2 Set To Be Launched On 25 March, Will Miss MWC 2014

The successor to the critically-acclaimed HTC One is expected to be announced on 25 March at events in London and New York rather than at Mobile World Congress (MWC) next week.

Press invites for the events have been sent out to the media and give precious little away about the handset, which has been dubbed as the HTC One 2 and HTC M8.

The latest rumours for the smartphone suggest that it will sport a five inch display, a 2.3 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, along with Android 4.4 Kit Kat and the HTC Sense 6 user interface, alleged screenshots of which have been posted on the @evleaks Twitter account.

HTC One 2

HTC will hope the smartphone will be able to reverse its falling market share, but questions will be raised about the decision to hold its own event rather than MWC, especially given that one of its main Android rivals, Samsung, is widely expected to launch its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone in Barcelona on Monday.

The struggling Taiwanese manufacturer adopted a similar approach last year, except that it announced the HTC One a week before MWC 2013 and showed off the device at the show.

Its new flagship is expected to form a main component of its strategy for 2014, along with wearable technology and a “renewed focus on marketing.” Members of the HTC USA product team discussed its roadmap for the next 12 months in a discussion on Reddit earlier this week and suggested that the company is working with Microsoft on Windows Phone 8.1 but did not rule out the possibility of producing more smartphones running the platform.

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