HTC's best phone series yet has been out for just over a month or two, but there is already talk of a successor to the J Butterfly/Droid DNA/Butterfly (global) series. This one might take a page from the Samsung Galaxy S series playbook, however, arriving on every carrier as under the same name, which is currently pegged as the M7 (though I expect HTC will have a different name for it whenever they do announce it).

The first thing I wanted to know upon discovering the earliest rumors weeks ago was what upgrades this new flagship could possibly offer over the two-month-old Droid DNA and the Butterfly/J Butterfly phones. I have compiled and highlighted the differences below, most of which are not exactly earth-shattering spec bumps:

• Processor: according to earlier rumors, the M7 was supposed to sport a Snapdragon S4 Prime MSM8974 chipset, but the latest rumors peg the processor to be the same S4 Pro APQ8064 featured in the Butterfly/DNA series. This makes sense if the device is indeed announced during CES this week or in the Mobile World Congress in February, since the MSM8974 isn't expected to hit the market until Q2 2013. The M7 will supposedly have a 200 MHz bump in clock speed to 1.7 GHz, though.
  
• Display: the M7 is expected to have a 1920x1080 display similar to that on the Butterfly/DNA phones, but this display will allegedly feature a technology called "SoLux" as opposed to the SLCD3 of the prior series. The SoLux display is rumored to provide better daylight visibility, wider viewing angles and more natural color reproduction than SLCD displays. Also, the pixel density will be higher courtesy of a smaller 4.7-inch size compared to the 5-inch beast on the DNA/Butterfly series.
  
• Camera: the M7's rear camera is expected to have a 13 MP resolution (the DNA/Butterfly series cameras are 8 MP).
  
• Storage: the M7 will apparently come in a 32 GB version in addition to the expected 16 GB version, but neither will apparently have expandable storage.
  
• Chassis: although earlier rumors suggested an aluminum unibody chassis, the latest take is that the M7 will feature the same materials as the DNA, sans the red accents.
  
• Perhaps the biggest difference will be the rumored Sense 5.0 interface, which is "clean and simple" according to HTC Source. Sense 5.0 supposedly features a vastly improved lockscreen design, improved designs in its HTC apps and more ease-of-use features such as an on-screen volume control featuring a quick shortcut to the full sound settings screen.
  
  • The underlying Android version on prototype units is apparently 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, but HTC Source thinks it may be upgraded to 4.2 by the time it launches. I'm more skeptical, however, given the plethora of bugs that Nexus users have encountered in Jelly Bean's latest iteration. I don't expect those bugs to be worked out to the satisfaction of HTC and the U.S. carriers in the first half of 2013 (the M7 is expected to ship in Q1 of this year).
    
  • Naturally you can expect our developers to port (or try to port) Sense 5.0 to any HTC phone from the last two years or so, so this particular difference will mainly be noticed by the average consumer
    
  • Interestingly, there have been a couple of leaked screenshots (phone dialer and keyboard) that purport to be taken from Sense 5.0, which I have posted below. The screenshots were posted by a Traditional Chinese Han-language site called techorz.com. I won't form an opinion about the reliability of this leak, but I will leave it to you to judge for yourselves.