Earlier in August, rumors abounded that HTC was reportedly working on a 5-inch smartphone slated for a September or October rollout. Recently, images of the purported device have surfaced on the Internet, fueling speculations that the Taiwan-based HTC is preparing to release the rumored rival to the Samsung Galaxy S3.

The mysterious HTC smartphon,e codenamed "HTC6435LVW," first made its appearance on a benchmarking site last month. The most recently leaked images are courtesy of The Verge, and the site admits that the "sadly blurry images" are not "a lot to go on."

The photographs do not disclose much about the physical appearance of the alleged HTC smartphone except a black body with red trimmings.

"The red accents on the metal rails on the side are a Verizon-favorite for its HTC line of devices. There's a Beats Audio logo too, plus a large sticker looks very much like what HTC has done on the One X (sealed battery and all)," states The Verge report.

If the images are authentic, then the presence of the "red accents" corroborate previous rumors that the smartphone is heading to U.S. carrier Verizon.

The rumored high-end HTC smartphone sports a 5-inch HD display with 1794x1080 resolution. A 1.5GHz Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 SoC paired with Adreno 320 graphics is expected to power the device. The smartphone is expected to come pre-loaded with Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Other details such as the phone's camera and internal memory are currently not known.

Whether the purported images are phony or genuine is anybody's guess and should be taken with a pinch of salt.