Google may be switching teams once again for this year’s Nexus smartphone, with recent rumours hinting at the search giant working with HTC to create a successor to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
GSMArena recently received a tip-off that claimed HTC has a phone in the works for Google and it just so happens to be one that’s already in the rumour mill. The HTC One X 5, as it’s now commonly known, is a 5-inch smartphone that we recently spotted in pictures.
Furthermore, the tipster kindly sent in some juicy specifications for the large gadget. First and foremost, the tip-off reaffirms the rumours of a 5-inch Full HD 1080p display, which is something we can’t wait to see. The Nexus 5 will also pack a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro chip from Qualcomm, a 12-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front camera, along with a whopping 64GB of internal memory.
That screen is bound to be a hefty drain on the battery, and HTC is rumoured to be slotting a large 2,500 mAh battery into the Nexus 5 to combat that.
This would mean that, for unknown reasons, Google has ended its two year run with Samsung, who made the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus. The company has used HTC before, way back in 2010 when it made the first ever Nexus device; the Google Nexus One.
Being a Nexus device means running the very latest version of Android, and at the moment we’ve not heard of any plans to launch something big straight after Jelly Bean. Therefore, we’re expecting Google to add a major update to the OS, taking the version up to 4.1.x. The tipster reckons the Nexus 5 will run 4.1.2 when it launches, although exactly when that will be is unknown.
It’s believed that Google will launch not one Nexus product this year, and instead will use several manufacturers to launch an array of different flagship products. Alongside the Nexus 5 from HTC, a phone with the model number GT-i9260 has been used to upload some random images to Picasa. The original Galaxy Nexus was the GT-i9250, so this phone could be a direct successor to it, again from Samsung.
Would you like to see just one Nexus phone this year, or several? Let us know your thoughts on our comments below or via our @Gadget_Helpline Twitter page or Official Facebook group.