The phone - simply called Mars- comes from a relatively new manufacturer Vernee, and it is promised for November. One might be sceptical as Vernee was the first company to promise the Helio X25 based phone that it still haven’t shipped to date. The company managed to ship the Vernee Apollo Lite, a downsized version of the phone, but it definitely was not the first to ship it.

Vernee Mars is the first Helio P20 phone. Helio P20 is internally also known as MT6757 and it is a successor to the quite good Helio P10. Helio P20  brings a lot of new things to the party. This is MediaTek’s first 16nm FinFET supporting up to 6GB of LPDDR4X memory. It's also MediaTek’s first SoC to support DDR4 and the new iteration, the LPDDR4X, will drop the voltage from 1.1 to 0.6V.

This is still an eight core Cortex A53 SoC with cores clocked up to 2.3 GHz and clocked to 2.3GHz, some 15 percent faster than the Helio P10. The Helio P20 comes with Mali T880 MP2 GPU that we’ve seen with the higher end Helio X25 / X20, but with MP4 faster configuration.  

One thing hasn't changed, the Helio P20 is still the using Cat 6. modem that supports carrier aggregartion and speeds up to 300 Mbps and upload to 50 Mbps. Most of the competitors are at Cat 9 or better  in the mainstream market.

Since this should be about Vernee, the company didn’t really tell us that much about the phone. It just said November, Helio P20 and 6GB RAM. There is a render of a bezel less phone and that’s about it. So with a lot of luck this phone might be shipping in November or at least before the end of this year.

We expect that the phone will be priced around $200 at launch.