Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends
Last year’s HTC U11 Life was a midrange phone with it all — an affordable phone with an attractive design, good performance, and even a nice level of water resistance thrown in for good measure. We liked it enough to choose it as the best phone under $400 in our list of the best cheap phones.
But nothing lasts forever, and the U11 Life’s time in the spotlight is nearly up. The HTC U12 Life is on the way, and we’re hoping it’s as good as its predecessor. Here’s everything we know about the HTC U12 Life.
Release date
Beauty and power meet on August 30th 2018. pic.twitter.com/pOVKlEzSGY
— HTC (@htc) August 23, 2018
Nothing about the HTC U12 Life has been confirmed yet, but it seems likely that we’ll be seeing it at HTC’s event on August 30. Previously leaked promotional materials concern a device known internally as “Imagine Life,” so while it’s not confirmed that the U12 Life will be launching at this event, it seems fairly likely.
Design
Not much has been leaked regarding the HTC U12 Life’s looks, but it’s a safe bet that the U12 Life will broadly follow the HTC U12 Plus‘s design.
On the plus side that means we’re likely to see a bezel-less design and a display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. Leaks support this, suggesting the U12 Life will come with a 6-inch, 2,160 x 1,080 display. According to rumors, the shrunken bezels will also mean the fingerprint scanner moves behind the phone, likely beneath the camera.
It’s less likely that we’ll see the same translucent glass on the HTC U12 Life as we saw on the U12 Plus — but it’s possible that HTC will attempt to replicate that see-through design with plastic on the U12 Life. Unfortunately, we might also see the HTC U12 Plus’s terrible digital buttons on the U12 Life.
Specs
The latest spec leaks come from Geekbench, and show a HTC device with the Snapdragon 660 processor and 4GB of RAM. That should put the device on par with some of the midrange offerings this year, and bodes well for the device’s relative power.
MySmartPrice
However, leaked promotional materials show the presumed HTC U12 Life equipped with the Snapdragon 636 — which would be a significant downgrade in power from the 660, putting the U12 Life more in line with the power of the U11 Life. However, the battery is apparently set to see a huge upgrade, jumping from 2,600mAh on the U11 Life to 3,600mAh on the U12 Life.
Other rumors put the device’s onboard storage at 64GB — though if that’s true, we expect there will also be a 32GB option available — with the option to expand storage by up to 256GB with a MicroSD card.
Camera
We haven’t seen much regarding the HTC U12 Life’s camera at this stage, but what we do know comes from the leaked promotional materials presumably made for the U12 Life’s launch. According to those, the HTC U12 Life will be packing a dual-lens arrangement on the rear, with a 16-megapixel and 5-megapixel lens, along with phase detection autofocus and 4K video recording capabilities. There’s a 13-megapixel selfie lens around the front, along with a flash and beauty mode.
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