New shiny
If HTC is aiming for water-tight secrecy around its product launches it clearly still has a bit of work to do. The confidentiality of the event itself is somewhat undermined by broadcasting the date and location on Facebook, and what little mystique left is definitely not helped by letting your press photos escape prematurely into the public domain.
But that's exactly what has happened, courtesy of pocketnow. The image below is claimed to be of the HTC Omega, which may be called the Radar upon release, or not. As you can see it's a pretty standard HTC look - especially reminiscent of the Trophy (underneath). There has been a move to silver/grey, maybe because Apple has yet to be granted a patent on that colour, but the phone is still dangerously rectangular.
The arrangements of the phones are consistent with the HTC press-shot style, although all images seem to have now been removed from the HTC press site, presumably to make things more challenging and stimulating for us hacks.
Other than the piccie, there's speculation about the spec. It's a given that the SoC will be Qualcomm's, it's just a matter of which one. The dream chip would be the the dual-core MSM 8x60, found in the Android Sensation, but pocketnow reckons it will be the MSM 8x55. The story says it's likely to be single-core which is a fair assumption, because it is. The photo appears to reveal a front-facing camera, which may well exist to allow Skype video chat.
When the first lot of HTC WP7 phones launched they also declined to use the very latest Snapdragon available, so it wouldn't be a great surprise if that was the case again. But whatever the reason behind this trend, HTC and Microsoft might want to have a look at it, as performance is becoming increasingly important in the high-end smartphone market and they risk being uncompetitive in that respect.
