HTC has something new coming. It's probably a phone, or at least something phone-adjacent, though the company has made a few interesting tangents in the last few years. Whatever it turns out to be, it will be shown off on January 12th. Exactly where and when hasn't been disclosed - HTC sent us the image above and a brief snippet of text, with no city or venue to go along with it. Presumably we'll be getting that information sometime in the next three weeks.

Hello,

HTC wanted to share the date of our next big announcement… 01.12.2017! ...More info to come soon...

If nothing else, the timing of the announcement is interesting. CES, the yearly orgy of consumer tech, wraps up in Las Vegas on Sunday, January 8th - but that show has been attracting less and less mobile hardware over the last few years. The main event for the first half of the year is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which doesn't kick off until late February. Of course, larger mobile manufacturers are now often opting to host their own press events outside the usual show venues. Such would seem to be the case here.

HTC's current flagship, the 10, isn't due for a replacement until the second quarter of 2017 at the earliest (assuming the company wants to stick to its usual schedule and go head-to-head with Samsung and LG). That could mean new entries for the mid-range Desire line, or a new phone family entirely, or something more off-the-wall like the follow-up to the HTC RE camera that absolutely no one asked for. We'll just have to wait and see.