Hasta La Gadget!

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.

Financially speaking, HTC hasn’t had the best track record this year. Even after promising to focus on hero devices in 2012, the company has had to deal with rough quarter after rough quarter. It seems that HTC is already working to make 2013 a bit brighter though — recent report from Focus Taiwan points out that the company is currently slaving away on its next flagship smartphone, tentatively named the “M7.”

There’s very little known about the device at this point, but a little digging from the folks at HTC Source seems to have unearthed an early spec sheet. If true, the M7 could ship with a 5-inch display running at 1080p, an aluminum unibody chassis, a 13-megapixel camera, and (most importantly) a Qualcomm APQ8064 quad-core processor.

On some level it seems like HTC is rushing into things — after all, the Taiwanese company just launched a pair of 1080p display-toting phones in Japan and the United States within the past two months, though it doesn’t seem like either of them will land in Europe any time soon. Then again there’s not a whole lot of time for players in the wireless industry to sit around and catch their proverbial breath. Rivals LG and Samsung are both widely expected to launch followups to their own respective flagship phones (complete with 1080p displays as well) within the first half of 2013. The eventual announcement may not be the most welcome news for customers who have just taken the plunge on another device, but hey — that’s just the nature of the beast.

If this thing really is in the works, then I imagine it won’t be too long before it makes its grand entrance — HTC usually shows off some impressive new hardware (the One series, anyone?) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and that’s less than three months away. Couple that with some analyst chatter about a March 2013 launch and the company’s track record with employees’ loose lips, and we have all the makings of a potential leakfest sooner rather than later.