HTC rumoured to launch three Windows Phone 8 devices this year

Not even a week has passed since Microsoft announced its next generation of smartphone and details of handsets have already begun to emerge.

Details of three devices by Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC have emerged. Two of these devices will be high end whereas one will be an entry-level Windows Phone 8 device.

The entry-level phone will be called “Rio.” It will feature a 4-inch WVGA display, 14.4Mbps HSPA, and a 5MP camera with 720p video recording. It’ll run on Qualcomm’s MSM8227 processor and have only 512MB of onboard storage.

The two higher-end phones will be called the “Accord” and “Zenith.” The specifications of these phones will represent the devices in the HTC One family. The Accord will have a 4.3-inch 720p Super LCD 2 display. This is the highest screen resolution Windows Phone 8 will support. The device also boasts of an 8MP camera, 42Mbps HSPA+, NFC support, 1GB of RAM, and a dual-core processor.

The “Zenith” on the other hand has specs even better than the Accord. It will have a 4.7-inch 720p Super LCD 2 display, an 8MP camera and 42Mbps HSPA+ data. The highlight of the Zenith is of course the quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip on which the device will run.

HTC Corporation CEO Peter Chou said in the statement, “HTC is committed to Windows Phone more than ever and we are excited to be bringing new Windows Phone 8-enabled smartphones to customers later this year.”

Huawei too will be launching a handset called the Ascend that will run on Windows Phone 8. No specification details are known about the device but this could be a nice opportunity for the Chinese company to grab some limelight.

Details of the Nokia handsets running Windows Phone 8 have been kept tightly wrapped. We hoe to see some impressive specs from the Nokia-Microsoft tie up. The strong connect between Microsoft and Nokia is evident from the fact that all handset manufacturers caring the WP8 will have Nokia Maps.

For those of you that are current WP7.5 users, there is bad news for you. You can only get an update of WP7.8 and not WP8.