HTC One X9 design and specs seemingly revealed in TENAA listing

It seems HTC isn’t quite done this year, as the One X9 looks to be close to a launch sometime sin the near future. As we suspected when rumored (unbelievable) specs were published, it’s not going to be competing with the next year’s flagships, but is built to compete with large mid-tier Android phones…

We’ve already seen an official looking advertisement for the One X9, as well as a sketchy press render. Now we finally have our eyes on something a little more official: Images published on TENAA (China’s equivalent of the FCC). From the images we see a device designed similarly to the recently announced One A9. The back is made almost entirely of metal, but instead of having two antenna bands, there’s only a single band near the bottom edge. The camera isn’t placed in the center, and is placed in its own panel, similar to the Nexus 6P.

What’s interesting here — to me at least — is that there are a couple of indicators suggesting this could be a replacement for the Desire range of smartphones. If not a replacement, it certainly looks a slightly more premium version of it.

As an example, there appears to be a plastic flap on the left edge, which we assume is there to give access to the SIM and Micro SD card slots. There’s also the two long cutout areas on the front panel, which we’ll assume is for some dual front-facing speakers. Also worth noting: The HTC logo on the front has been moved to the top of the phone, unlike most current phones, and has been replaced below the display by a set of three capacitive buttons.

As well as images, the TENAA page reveals some of the phone’s specifications. From what we can make out from the page, we can expect the follow features and specs:

• 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD display
• Octa-core 2.2GHz processor
• 2GB RAM
• Measures 153.2 x 75.9 x 7.99 mm
• 16GB storage – expandable to 1TB
• Android 5.0.2 Lollipop
• 13MP main camera with 1080p video recording

It’s a far cry from the show-stopping specs that were rumored recently. Given the number of big mid-rangers going with full HD screens now, it’s entirely plausible that HTC’s next middle-of-the-road phone does ship with a 1080p panel.

It’s worth noting, this particular model shown in TENAA’s listings is the One X9u, and is listed with China-compatible network bands. When, or if, the phone makes it to western shores, we could see slightly different specifications from those in the China-bound model.