HTC is headed back into the smartphone game with a "Desire 20 Pro": new leak

HTC's fortunes as a smartphone OEM have faded as of late. However, it has also recently made an effort to revitalize its Wildfire series as of late. Now, it is rumored to be planning a similar reboot for the Desire line. The device with which it will do so is said to be called the 20 Pro. However, a new set of benchmarking scores might have its potential audience wondering why.

This leak is based on a recent Geekbench 5 listing for a device calling itself the HTC 2Q9J10000. This is a reasonably plausible new model number from this Taiwanese OEM: for example, that of the U12+ is 2Q55100. Its possible new sibling is described as running Android 10 and having 6GB of RAM.

Its SoC is apparently from Qualcomm, runs at 1.8GHz and is identified as having an "ARM implementer 81 architecture 8 variant 10 part 2048 revision 2". These properties have been associated with Snapdragon 6-series processors in the past, most often the 665 or 660.

The scores achieved by the "Desire 20 Pro" suggest the latter is the more likely. Therefore, this phone (presuming it is in fact real) could contend with the Xiaomi Mi A3 or Redmi Note 7 based on its specs. This would be good potential news for HTC - were it not for the fact those phones were released last year.

All in all, it looks like this model would be destined for a considerably less than 'Pro' tier of the smartphone market in 2020.