HTC needs a hit. Desperately. According to ComScore they held less than 4% of smartphones in the US in the second quarter of this year, and IDC's worldwide statistics didn't even record the company, lumping it in with "others" and presumably rating it well below Lenovo's 4.7% marketshare. The leaks of the HTC (One?) A9, also known as the Aero, indicate that the company is hoping a slim, stylish, and undeniably derivative design are going to help it win new customers with its next major release.

The latest set of leaks come from Twitter, where OnLeaks posted a series of photos of what appear to be a near-finished version of the phone in black, though it's labeled as a dummy unit.

Well, here is your very best look at #HTCA9 aka #HTC's Aero... #Dummy pic.twitter.com/9yG6ydz3XA

— OnLeaks (@OnLeaks) October 10, 2015

Note the power and volume buttons on the right edge of the device, SIM and SD card slots (accessible via pinhole tool) on the left, and the HTC logo rather awkwardly squashed in between the physical home button and the bottom of the screen. Since said screen includes virtual navigation buttons, it seems like a fair bet that that button also functions as a fingerprint sensor. A standard MicroUSB port (no USB Type-C), microphone, headphone jack, and mono speaker are all crammed into the bottom edge, and the top looks like it has the same infrared remote port as the One Mx series.

Leaked specs are decidedly mid-range, with a 5-inch, 1080p screen, a Snapdragon 617 processor, 2GB of RAM, just 16GB of storage, and a 2150mAh battery. If that seems small, it is, but it enables the phone to be just 7mm thick (at least according to the leaks). Hopefully we'll get more concrete information on October 20th, when HTC is scheduled to reveal a Marshmallow-powered Android device.

Source: OnLeaks