On Sunday, a kid posted a 12-minute hands-on review of HTC's as-yet-unreleased HTC One successor. In the same night, he earned himself a threat from HTC's senior global communications manager, Jeff Gordon. Gordon has since backtracked on his statements, but the company is still taking the airing of its secrets seriously.

The video review was originally posted to YouTube by Roshan Jamkatel. During the video, he demonstrated several differences from the original HTC One, including dual cameras on the back of the phone, a lack of buttons on the bottom of the body, and a lack of Beats Audio branding with different sounding audio hardware (demonstrated by the 2008 hit song "Crank That (Soulja Boy)"). The body and screen are both slightly bigger, and the metal accents appear to have a different finish. As Jamkatel turned the phone over and over in his hands, he displayed the IMEI number on the back of the phone.

The video circulated quickly after it was posted and was highlighted by Shen Ye of xda-developers' XDA TV. After the video made its way around to Gordon, Gordon tweeted at Jamkatel, "It's not going to be a good week for you, my friend. :-(". Jamkatel tried to claim that the phone was fake, at which point Gordon said HTC has the IMEI info and that the company would be "in touch."

Gordon has since deleted the tweets and denied that he ever threatened the boy. Jamkatel variously claimed that the phone was fake, that he did not post the video, that someone else had done it for him against his wishes, and that a parent who worked at HTC had been fired due to the course of events. The IMEI of the phone strongly suggests it is not fake, and third parties on Twitter found evidence that neither of Jamkatel's parents work at HTC.

The leak bears some similarity to that of Apple's iPhone 4 in 2010. An engineer's concealed model was left in a bar and shopped around by its finder to technology blogs and sites before Gizmodo picked it up. The coverage ended with a private police force breaking into Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's home and confiscating his laptop.

It's unclear how Jamkatel managed to obtain the phone in the first place, though he does refer to the handset as a developer version during the review. HTC could not provide Ars with a comment given that the handset is now an ongoing legal matter, but the person who will be held accountable will ostensibly be the party who signed an NDA to get the handset, not Jamkatel himself. The HTC One's successor, colloquially referred to as the HTC One 2, will likely be announced at a March 25 event in London.

Listing image by Roshan Jamkatel/Austin Ouellette