It appears that a high court judge revealed HTC’s plans regarding the release of its next flagship smartphone that will be a replacement of HTC One smartphone. A ruling has been published by Richard Arnold stating that a new model would be released in the UK in either February or March of the upcoming year. If the report is true, then it would mean that the company is going to replacing HTC One’s in just under a year as it was released in April 2013. Typically, it is the trend of phone manufacturers to keep such details a secret so far ahead of the launch because they don’t wish to discourage customers from purchasing the existing models in the market.

A spokeswoman of the Taiwanese company HTC said that she did not have any knowledge of any such plans of the company. However, it was noted by the judge that Nokia had provided evidence proving that there would be a first quarter launch of the so called HTC One Two and brought it to his attention during the patent dispute between the two companies. Moreover, he added that this fact had not been contradicted by HTC’s lawyer, which led him to believe that the information was based on fact. The timing of the release was helpful to the case because it assisted in influencing the judge’s decision that sales of the HTC One should not be banned at this time.

An injunction is being sought by Nokia for prevent the sales of HTC smartphones following a ruling that had been made in October that one of the patents of the Finnish giant had been infringed by the Asian firm. An invention that had been filed in 1998 was the center of the case as it was for the design of a modulator; equipment that’s used by phones for the purpose of transmitting data. It has been argued by HTC that it was not the company’s fault because the technology had been incorporated into a chip that was made by another firm –Qualcomm.

However, the judge ruled that HTC still should have paid license fees to Nokia. It has been agreed by a judge in the latest ruling that in theory, several HTC phones should be removed from the UK shop shelves. This list of phones include the One Mini and One Max that are powered by Android and are simply smaller and larger versions of its main handset. Other phones such as Windows Phone 8S and 8X are also included. If the application for an appeal that has been submitted by HTC is accepted, this scenario would be prevented.

Nonetheless, the firm has agreed that it would not be importing any more copies of the disputed handsets until a decision is taken, which means that the devices might go out of stock. Nokia had pressed for a sales ban to be implemented on the bestselling phone of the Taiwanese company; the One. Because UK is the biggest market for HTC in Europe, this would have been a big blow seeing as it’s the Christmas period, which is one of the busiest period of sales.

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