HTC doubles down on Windows Phone 8 with flagship 8X and mid-range 8S

HTC has officially shown its Windows Phone 8 hand with the announcement of the HTC 8X and HTC 8S at a media event in New York today.

And the UK market is clearly a high priority for the Taiwanese firm, as both new handsets will go on sale locally in early November, just days after Microsoft lets its next-gen mobile OS loose on the world.

We've known about HTC's event for a while now, but with all the other new phones that have been announced recently, we'd half forgotten about it – or we had until the rumour mill went into overdrive in the past few days.

The higher-end 8X (or the Accord, as we got to known it on Rumour Boulevard) is pretty much exactly as we were expecting: a 4.3in Super LCD 2 display with 720p resolution, a dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage.

The 8S, meanwhile, is limited to a 1GHz dual-core CPU, a 4in WVGA screen, 512MB of RAM and just 4GB of storage. Both, obviously, will come with Windows Phone 8 pre-loaded, and predictably both have a slice of Beats Audio sound tech too.

HTC has clearly gone for the “funky” look with some bright colours and rounded design language, which will see plenty of comparison between them and Nokia's Lumia 920 and Lumia 820. For my money Nokia's are the better looking, and based on the companies' respective reputations when it comes to build quality, they'll more than likely be more sturdily put together too.

For now, though, comparisons will have to be on a spec-by-spec basis, as we won't be seeing either manufacturer's range of Windows Phone 8 handsets until Microsoft actually rolls out its new OS at the end of the month.

And when it does, HTC will have plenty of stiff competition on its hands from the wide array of new devices that will have launched by then to capture the Christmas spending buck. Let's just say pricing is going to be key here.

The event saw no mention of the third HTC Windows Phone 8 handset we've been hearing about lately, the 4.7in Zenith. Given that the Accord has launched with the flagship “X” naming designation, however, we have to assume the Zenith has been scrapped altogether.