Google buys part of HTC in £1.1bn deal

"This agreement is a testament to the decade-long history of teamwork between HTC and Google", notes Rick Osterloh, Senior Vice President, Hardware, Google. Despite the fact that HTC has great ability to design and produce excellent hardware, it unable to generate good sales as Samsung's Android phones or iPhone makes. So far, HTC has remained on the safe side of things but that might change with the U11 Plus.

"This agreement is a brilliant next step in our longstanding partnership, enabling Google to supercharge their hardware business while ensuring continued innovation within our HTC smartphone and VIVE virtual reality businesses", said HTC chairwoman and CEO Cher Wang in a press statement. Both companies announced the agreement late Wednesday, or early morning local time for HTC. The squeezable Edge Sense on the HTC U11 pictured above, while definitely new, still feels more like a gimmick (that is, until Google adds it to the Pixel 2). "HTC will continue to have best-in-class engineering talent, which is now working on the next flagship phone, following the successful launch of the HTC U11 earlier this year".

Some information coming from France hints at the coming of HTC U11 Plus. There are not much known about the phone as of now.

A couple of reports and rumours suggest that the upcoming HTC U11 Plus will be called with a codename - Ocean Master. That gives it the same 18:9 aspect ratio as the LG G6 and LG V30. That means a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (no 836 here), 4 or 6 GB of RAM, 64 or 128 GB of storage.

According to the leak, the HTC U11 Plus will be the company's jump into the bezel-less smartphone race. In the imaging department, the phone is expected to come with 12-megapixel camera at the rear. The front camera, however, seems to have been downgraded to 8 megapixels only, perhaps because of new space constraints.

One rational way to see at HTC's refusal to close down smartphone operations completely is that do so would be shattering for the inventory the HTC already has with carriers and stores around the globe. It will also use HTC's IP to support its own family of Pixel smartphones.