It’s fair to say that the Sony Xperia Z was probably one of the worst kept secrets ahead of CES earlier this year and holds the position as possibly the worst kept secret in mobile for 2013 so far, but HTC’s new flagship looks be giving it a run for its money ahead of its anticipated launch, scheduled for later today.
The HTC M7 or HTC One as it’s suspected to be named at launch, will serve as the benchmark for HTC’s 2013 device portfolio going forward and takes over from the HTC One X which took the flagship spot following its arrival at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year.
Although we often find @evleaks to be the go-to treasure trove for leaked press imagery of phones and tablets, this time around French website nowhereelse.fr were the first to come into possession of what appears to be an official press image of the M7/One. The highly detailed pick reveals a ton of information we previously hadn’t really been able to capture in lower resolution images.
First and foremost, if this image is legitimate, the HTC One will come in two colours, a graphite black/grey option and a silver finish option. The edge of the phone’s frontage also looks to feature a polished chamfer very similar to the one Jony Ive was proud of on the iPhone 5. The back features a centrally mounted camera which is said to utilise ‘Ultrapixel’ technology and of course the Beats Audio logo is present and correct on the lower portion of the handset’s back as well as the video playback screen, which clarifies that MP4 playback will obviously be supported.
The front of the phone also plays host to two large speaker grilles, which could simply be for symmetry’s sake or as there’s no loudspeaker visible on the back, perhaps the lower grille serves that purpose instead. To finish it all off, we see the new version of the HTC Sense homescreen; likely to be called Sense 5.0. Whilst much of the UI appears to be a variation of what we’ve already come to know, the homescreen makes use a monochromatic weather widget and some sort of aggregated feed widget which is pulling in local news information, Facebook updates and sporting content; perhaps alluding to a focus social networking and content consumption. The last piece of the picture is the button layout, with the three traditional HTC keys replaced by a back and home button either side of the HTC logo.
We’ll be on hand later today to discover how on the money the handset in these shots is and discover what makes HTC newest device really tick.
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