Orange S.A., a French telecommunications company, posted images of the HTC One A9, along with its technical specifications.
The French network carrier uploaded the device's profile into its catalog a few days ago but was quick to take it down. Nonetheless, it gave enough of a time window for details to be noted and screenshots to be taken.
Orange's struck-down profile page revealed that the HTC One A9 has a 5-inch 1080p display along with a 4 MP front-facing camera and 13 MP main, which is suspected to be the same "Ultrapixel" camera that HTC used for its previous releases. The processor is an octa-core Snapdragon 617 SoC, which is sensible for the 2GB of RAM that was specified.
What didn't make sense, however, is the $680 price tag that Orange put on the HTC One A9 listing. Based on the listed specs, the A9 is closer to the Galaxy S4 that Samsung released back in the spring of 2013 and as such, it should be priced for lower than the S6 and S6 edge, which is currently Samsung's premiere line up. The specs are for the mid-range smart phone market, it should be way below $400. Either the pricing is wrong or the specs are for another device. With this in mind, both the specs and the pricing should be taken with skepticism.
If there's anything that is close to legitimate, it would be the high-definition renders. The images sparked arguments that boiled down to who copied who. Regardless of the answer, there's no fault in saying that the iPhone and HTC looks almost identical, even the back cover suggests the same.
Will an iPhone running on Android save HTC?
Note that last August 2015, HTC reported an operating loss of $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2015 due to a decline in demand within the Android device market. After the disappointing numbers were revealed, the Taiwanese multinational corporation is looking to slash down its expenditures and will implement other cost-cutting strategies by 2016.
HTC is expected to officially take the One A9 out of the box on Oct. 20. The official specs and pricing should be revealed then.
