HTC M7 picture leaks, keeps capacitive touch buttons

This is the first look at what could well be the HTC M7, the super smart phone the Taiwanese company is hoping will revive its fortunes.

The snap was posted (and subsequently taken down) on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, Android Community reports. As well as what could be the M7 (it's not exactly a studio shot, as you can see), there's another glimpse at HTC's Sense 5.0 UI that'll run on it. Click through the gallery to see all the snaps.

There's not much to be deduced from the picture, other than that the M7 will have a black polycarbonate shell, as we heard previously. It looks a little like the HTC 8X, HTC's Windows Phone 8 handset. The M7 will also reportedly keep the three capacitive touch buttons below the screen, as seen on previous HTC handsets like the One X. That's because the legacy menu button is still there on the Sense 5.0 screenshots. So hard cheese if you were hoping for on-screen navigation buttons.

Sense 5.0 looks cleaner and simpler, too, but it's still recognisably HTC's UI.

The M7 is reported to come running Android Jelly Bean 4.2. It promises to be quite a beast as well, with its 4.7-inch screen cramming in 1080p resolution. Inside is said to be a 1.7GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage. A 13-megapixel camera sits on the back, too. It's no slouch.

HTC still hasn't confirmed the M7 exists, but I reckon it'll be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February. HTC needs a hit after its recent financial woes. The Taiwanese company has slumped to its lowest profit since it started making Android blowers, coining just £21.5 million in the last three months. This continues a downward trend for the company, so let's hope the M7 proves a success story.

Are you looking forward to it? What else would you like to see from the device? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.