Rumours suggest March 8 launch for HTC M7

Rumours surrounding HTC’s upcoming flagship—the M7—are spreading like wildfire, especially after it recently came to light that the company would be holding a press conference on February 19. And the latest to hit the web comes from HTCSource: the M7 will allegedly see the light of day on March 8, and may hit Europe before it makes its way to American shores.

There is also some information regarding the colours in which the device will be available. While most of the leaked images of the M7 show a black handset, the phone will also be available in white. This has led to speculation about a white bezel for the white coloured variant of the handset.

It is also also rumoured that the device will feature an aluminium unibody design, much like HTC’s One S. But this is doubtful, as according to HTCSource, the M7 offered by Sprint featured the same soft-touch casing as the Droid DNA—aka the Butterfly.

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If you thinkin’bout the M7, it don’t matter if it’s Black Or White

HTC’s press event will take place in London ahead of MWC 2013 and it is very likely that the company will officially unveil 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.

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 early in January. Judging by 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 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 (40 percent higher 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, and 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.