These days, it’s difficult for any high-end smartphone manufacturer to completely avoid knock-offs of their hard work hit the market. In fact, some brands, like Goophone, have turned this shameless copying into something of an artform. Let’s say that you want to look like you have a Galaxy S5, or HTC One, but you can’t afford either one of those devices. Companies like Goophone are more than happy to sell you device that will look the part and talk the talk for a fraction of what the real deal will cost you. This has been going on for years, we saw it with the iPod and now we’re seeing it with brand-name smartphones. Still, we wouldn’t expect someone like Huawei to be sticking so close to a competitor’s design, or would we?
The above image is allegedly the back panel of the upcoming Huawei D3 and if you think it looks something like the HTC One Max released last year, you’re not alone. At first glance you think ‘sure, they’re both metal and such’ but upon close inspection the fingerprint scanner hole lines up nicely with the camera lens spacing, just like it does on the…One Max from HTC. Have Huawei designed a device that looks like HTC’s giant One Max on purpose? While that’s hard to say, we’d be pretty surprised if Huawei’s designers had never seen a One Max before, especially as larger handsets are fairly popular in Huawei’s Far Eastern home.
With no word on a real release date or any word on specs of the device – aside from an included fingerprint scanner – it’s hard to say how close to the One Max’s design the Ascend D3 will be sticking. Still, we’re sure that HTC might not mind too much, especially if they can market their next One Max as the ‘real thing’, if they decide to create another giant One that is.