With Mobile World Congress just around the corner and Samsung holding off on the Galaxy S III, the table is set for a company like HTC to “win” the show. Rumors suggest that it will introduce a monster handset called the “Endeavour” and this could signal a massive change for HTC smartphones.
This doesn’t appear to be the HTC Ville that has been leaked multiple times, as Android Modaco reports that the HTC Endeavour will pack a massive 4.7-inch screen with a 720p HD resolution, will run Android Ice Cream Sandwich presumably with Ice Cream Sandwich and it will have an 8-megapixel camera with all the other goodies you’d expect from a high-end smartphone.
What’s really interesting about this rumor is that it suggests the HTC Endeavour will be powered by the quad-core Tegra 3 chip from NVIDIA. This is interesting because Qualcomm is an investor in HTC, has been used nearly exclusively and it has quad-core processors of its own coming out soon. NVIDIA has been indicating that we’ll see multiple quad-core Tegra 3 smartphones at MWC, so perhaps HTC will be one of those providers.
This shift to NVIDIA may not be part of a larger trend for HTC but the company has been struggling with its sales and design, so it’s retooling its strategy to focus on fewer but better devices. In my previous conversations with HTC, it said that its relationship with Qualcomm does not preclude it from using other vendors’ chipsets and that the company is very comfortable being on the bleeding edge of technology.
It’s still just a rumor right now but MWC is coming faster than you think, so we’ll know a lot more in the next few days.
[Via Android Modaco, image credit]
