HTC is the sort of company that’s never had the best luck at keeping new products under wraps, and it seems it won’t be bucking that trend any time soon. Case in point: Evleaks (now at UnwiredView) has recently obtained a what’s said to be a render of the company’s new top-tier M7 Android smartphone, and it’s definitely not what most of us expected to see.
Got your grains of salt ready? Good, because you’ll need them.
The M7’s rumored specs — 4.7-inch display, 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor — have been making the rounds for weeks now, but this render depicts a device that seems like a marked step back from the company’s current design language. It’s a… weird looking device to be sure, thanks to its abject lack of HTC branding and its multitude of drilled speaker holes, and the device bears more than a passing resemblance to RIM’s forthcoming all-touch BlackBerry Z10 device.
What’s more, there’s no sort of demarcation to indicate where the device’s screen ends and where the bezel begins — it could be that HTC has taken its CEO’s zeal for innovation to heart and crafted a phone with an edge-to-edge screen, but the end result would probably look more like this (courtesy of an UnwiredView commenter).
Now before you’re tempted to judge the device already, know that the device that’s expected to be unveiled in a few weeks in Barcelona may ultimately look nothing like this. It’s worth pointing out again that Evleaks has a fairly solid track record with this sort of thing, but the render in question was supposedly yanked from a video clip meant to teach users how to install their SIM cards for the first time, and he (she? they?) has expressed doubt that this is the design that will soon see the light of day. On top of that, another supposedly leaked image of a device in the wild doesn’t look much like this recently outed render (though in fairness, the image is an extreme close-up of the M7’s screen).
There’s really no way to tell how accurate the render is just yet, but it shouldn’t be long before a handful of new leaks shed some more light on things. Until then, let us gnaw on what few morsels of information we have and dream of what will come.
The original render, and a tweaked mock-up of what it may look like with the screen turned on.