In fact these photos weren’t “leaked” in the traditional sense, but rather it appears that HTC actually put the phone up for display at an industry event in Taiwan. The event in question was regarding 5G technology and HTC decided to bring a phone along which we can only assume was for testing.
"HTC today (1/29) participated in the inaugural meeting of "Taiwan 5G Industry Alliance – Chunghwa Telecom Pilot Team," featuring Vive PRO, Vive Focus, unlisted VR devices from Taiwan and HTC phones that have not been released to the public" pic.twitter.com/dZaMBygO39
— 🟣₄cₕₐₙ (@iamaniff) January 30, 2018
As you can see in the photo, posted on Twitter by user @iamaniff, the handset was purposely obscured in order to conceal its identity, but we guess it wasn’t done very well as it was quickly identified as the potential HTC U12. HTC has not confirmed anything, of course, but based on the photo it certainly does resemble the previous leak.
It also “confirms” that HTC is working on creating a handset with a bezel-less display, but other than that it’s hard to tell what to expect from the phone. It has also been reported that HTC will not be announcing the phone at MWC 2018 and could instead choose to launch it at an event of their own choosing.