Samsung is widely believed to unleash the Galaxy S4 on Q1 2013 but at around the same time, Taiwan's HTC it rumored to wow the tech world anew with a new high-end smartphone known for now as M7.

Citing reports by Focus Taiwan, BGR News said on Thursday that HTC has made preparations for the production of up to seven million M7s, which the mobile phone maker is said to release anytime between January and March next year.

This M7 is touted as the new hero HTC smartphone, with the Asian tech company reportedly focusing its ongoing recovery efforts next year to the handset, which presumably will replace the impressive Droid DNA.

While not lacking in hardware and software muscles, experts noted that HTC has yet to capitalise big time on the strings of smartphones that it has been releasing this year despite the continuing global dominance of Android over that of Apple's iPhone.

According to TechCrunch, "the M7 could ship with a 5-inch display running at 1080p, an aluminium unibody chassis, a 13-megapixel camera, and a Qualcomm APQ8064 quad-core processor."

The phone is also expected to be 4G-LTE capable. Its unibody casing is said to assume the same housing that HTC has deployed with the One X series but with more metallic touch, Droid-Life.com speculated.

Judging from the available details so far, HTC appears pushing the envelope on smartphone specs and seems bent on jumping the gun on current leader Samsung, which is likely to unwrap the Galaxy S4 at about the same time its predecessor, the S3, was launched May this year.

The idea is for HTC "to net some market share for itself," according to AndroidCommunity.com. There is a strong likelihood then that Samsung would stretch the previous published specs, all based on speculations, of the S4 if only to stave off threats from other Android handset makers, experts said.

Among the latest crop of smartphone players, HTC, in spite of its difficulty in wooing consumers, has been getting the raves for its powerful and beautifully-crafted handsets that extend both in Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 platforms.

The prevailing belief is the M7 will be uncloaked come the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which TechCrunch said is scheduled on February 25-28 2013, giving HTC just the right launching pad for the phone's expected commercial release on March of the same year.