HTC to hold press event in February, may announce the M7

All eyes are on HTC as MWC 2013 nears and leaks of its next flagship, the M7, flood the Internet. But an announcement of the M7 may not be far off, as according to Pocket Lint, the Taiwan-based company has confirmed that it will be holding a press event in London on February 19. While the event is going to happen before MWC 2013, it is very likely that HTC will be officially unveiling the M7 at the event. However, this does run contrary to earlier rumours that suggested that the company would announce the phone during MWC itself.

We recently got a better look at the HTC M7 thanks to a leaked video. While there isn’t a lot about the phone itself, we do get a good look at the handset’s front and rear. The video draws comparisons between the M7’s casings with those of the One X+ and the Butterfly.

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The M7 may get announced sooner than expected

The M7’s rear looks strikingly similar to that of the Butterfly. The biggest difference is the camera button on the side. The device will also not be water-resistant like the Butterfly was. Unlike the Butterfly, the M7 will not have the notification LEDs on the back. A look at the middle housing of the device reveals that the device will indeed sport a 4.7-inch display.

Some new images of the M7, along with screenshots of the new version of HTC’s Sense UI—Sense 5— popped up earlier this month. Looking at the picture and screenshots, it is worth noting that the upcoming version of Sense will have a cleaner interface and will be ditching the Ring-based lockscreen that can be found in Sense 3.5 and above. It is also worth noting that the positions of the Home and Multitasking buttons have been swapped. Design wise, the phone is very similar to the HTC Butterfly.

The new Sense UI also features a new clock widget. The new widget seems to opt for a more subtle and vector-based look as opposed to the bright weather widget in the past versions. It also seems to feature new rectangular widgets social networking, news feeds and tutorials.

The HTC M7 is all set to be one of the first devices to sport a 1080p resolution on a 4.7-inch screen, which will give it a pixel density of 468 ppi (a 40 percent higher ppi than that of the iPhone 5). It also has a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, an LTE chip, a 13 megapixel camera with 1080p recording, and an f/2.0 aperture. It will also have a 2 megapixel front-facing camera with 1080p video recording. On the audio side of things, the device is set to have a dedicated amplifier designed by Beats, along with stereo speakers. It is also set to support the next-gen Wi-Fi standard of 802.11ac, which theoretically has three times the throughput of 802.11n.