HTC Building Marlin and Sailfish Nexus Devices

Every year as October draws near, many of us get excited about the upcoming Nexus devices. Designed by a different OEM each year with heavy Google involvement, the Nexus lineup offers superb devices and a clean Android design. It doesn’t hurt that they are often cheaper than most of their competitors. This year, it looks like HTC will be releasing two devices codenamed Marlin and Sailfish.

For some reason, Google has tended to name their Nexus devices after fish. The Nexus 5 was named Hammerhead and Nexus 6 Shamu. For HTC to be making the Marlin and Sailfish is a big deal since most OEMs only have one Nexus device launched at once. This jives with previous rumours that Google would be turning to HTC as their main Nexus supplier for the next three years. Even with the apparent success of the Vive, the company is still in dire financial straits.

So far, there is no indication if these 2 devices are phones or tablets. There are some hints floating around that Marlin will use the Snapdragon 820. Given Nexus devices to lag a bit behind in performance, the use of a nearly year old SoC makes perfect sense. If HTC can make a cheap Nexus will all the build quality and repairability of the Vive and HTC 10, I would be the first in line.