German retailer Cyberport.de listed the HTC One M9 on its online shop over the weekend, leading to a flurry of excitement surrounding the forthcoming flagship HTC smartphone.

Discovered by website Mobilegeeks.de, the images look like full device renders. If you're a follower of HTC, you'll know that these are exactly the sort of thing that HTC uses to illustrate new devices on launch day. 

Of course, with a dab of Photoshop (happy 25th birthday, by the way) it's easy enough to create these renders yourself and there's no shortage of fan-made images out there.

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Cyberport.de

Retailers are especially prone to using mock-ups, particularly those selling accessories - a glance through websites of HTC One M9 cases will open a Pandora's box device of renders. So these might not be the real deal.

However, let's look at what we've got. The interesting detail here is that they deviate from the unibody design of the M8. The gold on silver option is especially interesting because either there's a frame and backplate, or HTC has bonded the two different metal colours together for this design. If you compare the HTC One M8 and the HTC One M9 (below) you can see the difference.

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HTC One M9 (top) vs HTC One M8 (bottom)

We've seen a lot of leaks surrounding this devices from @upleaks on Twitter, who added some information to these images, saying that the colours that will be offered are gunmetal grey, silver back with gold front, and gold back and gold front.

The pages have now been pulled from the retailer, but the specs appear to be what we expected: 2.0GHz octo-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset with 3GB of RAM. It's said to have 32GB storage, with microSD card support.

The display on the front is a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. The rear camera is 20.7-megapixels, and the front camera uses the 4-megapixel UltraPixel sensor.

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Cyberport.de

The thickness is said to be 9.61mm and the weight is 157.5g. The battery is 2900mAh, a slight increase in capacity over the HTC One M8.

There's little here we hadn't heard before and the cynic could easily say that this is educated guesswork, but we like the attention to detail, for example, with the tweaked icons on the display, that could be a hint at a slightly softer HTC Sense , designed to fit with Android 5.0 Lollipop more naturally.

The new HTC One M9 will launch on 1 March, just before Mobile World Congress 2015 and we'll bring you all the (real) news, as it happens.