HTC will soon stop selling its 2014 flagship — the One M8 — and instead replace it with a slightly lower-spec’d handset, the One M8s. While the One M8s is going to be almost identical to the One M8, it will use a slightly slower Snapdragon 615 chipset — a 64-bit octa-core chip that consists of four ‘low power’ Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1GHz and four high-performance Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz using ARM’s big.LITTLE technology. Other specs of the handset will remain the same as the original M8, including the Duo Camera on the back, a 2600mAH battery and front-facing BoomSound speakers. HTC Benelux director Mark Moons said that the change was necessary for HTC to continue selling the One M8. Qualcomm usually stops manufacturing its previous-generation high-end chipsets once their newer gen chipset starts showing up in Android devices. Moons also revealed that the One M8s will be priced 250 euros lower than the company’s current flagship — the One M9, which pegs the price of the handset to be around 499 euros. It is likely that the One M8s will first launch in Europe followed by an expanded launch in other regions of the world, though its exact launch timeframe is currently unknown.
