HTC has quietly announced a lower-cost variant of the One M8 in the M8s. The M8s features slight changes to last year’s M8 such as a Snapdragon 615 processor and changes the camera sensors for conventional units as opposed to the previous UltraPixel sensors, which were a critical and commercial failure. The Snapdragon 615 features eight 64-bit cores with four main cores clocked at 1.7GHz and four secondary cores clocked at 1.0GHz in a big.LITTLE configuration.
The phone will ship with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, while supporting memory cards up to 128GB in size. The main camera features a 13-megapixel sensor with a Duo Camera light/depth metering sensor above it and a lens aperture of f/2.0, while the front-facing camera features a 5-megapixel sensor.
The phone, which is meant for Europe, includes limited support for LTE (bands 3, 5, 7, 8, 20), and includes Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, GPS, GLONASS, and WiFi. The One M8s features HTC’s signature BoomSound stereo speakers, packs the usual array of environmental sensors, and a built-in 2,840mAh battery. The phone will ship with Android 5.0 Lollipop with the older Sense 6.0 user interface overlay from HTC with BlinkFeed instead of the recently announced Sense 7 update found on the M9. Pricing is set at the equivalent of $410.
