HTC has done a surprisingly good job of keeping its next-generation One M9 a secret until now, but with just one week to go until its grand unveiling at Mobile World Congress, the handset’s specifications have been leaked — alongside what are claimed to be genuine pictures of the device in a number of colors.
The leak was spotted by Mobile Geeks, which found the specifications and images on German retail site Cyberport. The listings claim the device will have a 5-inch 1080p display just like its predecessor, Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 810 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.
Cyberport also lists a microSD card slot, a front-facing UltraPixel camera for selfies, a new 20-megapixel rear-facing camera, and HTC’s latest Sense 7 software on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
These specifications certainly aren’t surprising; this is exactly what we’ve been promised by other rumors over the past few weeks. But what makes this leak unique is that it comes with a whole bunch of images of the One M9 in both gold and black.
Click on the images above to view them full-size.
What’s unclear at this point is whether these images are genuine. They certainly look it, but based on what we’ve already heard about the One M9, it seems they could be little more than very convincing mockups.
Recent reports have promised us that the One M9’s front-facing camera sensor will be larger, and centered in the middle of the device. They’ve also said that the handset’s front-facing BoomSound speakers will be concealed, negating the need for all those tiny holes.
We’ve also been told that previous images of the device, which look just like those above, were of decoy units distributed by HTC mostly for testing, but also to throw us off the scent of the real design of the One M9.
This is one of the scenarios described by Evan Blass, who famously ran the @evleaks Twitter account and has leaked countless HTC devices in the past, in a recent piece for AndroidBeat. Blass notes how HTC could have gone to great lengths — issuing decoy devices and even fake images — to ensure its real One M9 remains a secret until the launch event on March 1.
The other scenario, of course, is that this is indeed the real design of the One M9, and HTC is making a whole lot of fuss over a device that looks almost identical to its predecessor.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, given how popular the One M8 was, and how much praise it received for its design. But now that we’ve been expecting more significant improvements, fans would surely be disappointed if they don’t materialize.
[via The Verge]