Posted by Mike Evans in Coming Soon on February 3, 2011

Although HTC showed off the HTC Thunderbolt at CES 2011, the company was somewhat overshadowed by Motorola’s and LG’s new smartphones with their Tegra2-equipped dual-core chips powering them to unbelievable new levels of performance. Fortunately for HTC fans, the company wasn’t prepared to sit back and let its competitors take all the glory. It had plans up its sleeve…big plans!

And by big, I mean a Tegra2-busting 1.2Ghz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip powering a new Android device currently called the HTC Pyramid (though I doubt it’ll be called that when it’s launched).
HTC Pyramid

What we know about the HTC Pyramid

The Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 chip that will power the Pyramid is an absolute beast. Here are some of its finer features:

  • 1.2GHz dual-core design
  • two of the cores can power applications while one core powers the HSPA+ modem (in English: there are two cores, but unlike other dual-core chips, which assign one core to the modem and another to applications, the MSM8260 assigns part of one core to the modem if needed, and both cores can also be used to power applications)
  • 1080p Full HD video recording and playback
  • 2D/3D graphics acceleration that can render 88 million triangles per second and 532 millions 3D pixels per second (think PS2 performance!)

Like I say, it’s a beast, and more than capable of keeping up with the Tegra2 chip of the LG Optimus 2X and Motorola Atrix.

In addition to the new dual-core chip, though, HTC’s Pyramid will also come with a 4.3″ 960×540 resolution display and will support HSPA+ networks (i.e. “4G”, with download speeds on compatible networks reaching 14Mbps).

There’s no other info available at the moment, but one final tasty tidbit is that the dual-core processor is capable of supporting a 16 megapixel camera!

So, just when you thought you’d seen the most powerful phones of 2011 at CES 2011, be prepared to be blown away yet again as HTC takes centre-stage. The rumours suggest we’ll be seeing the Pyramid (or whatever it’s called) at MWC 2011 in less than two weeks time, with a release date of summer 2011 on T-Mobile.

[Source: Android And Me]