Rumors have been swirling this week of a new HTC smartphone in the works codenamed "Ville," and BGR's reporting specs that should make even the most jaded power user swoon: Ice Cream Sandwich, an 8-megapixel camera with a backside-illuminated sensor, a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, and a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, all crammed into a shell less than 8mm thick. The phone is said to be mostly metal, and as such, it'll forgo NFC — a hot buzzword among high-end smartphones right now — but the overwhelming majority of users likely won't miss it. Naturally, Ice Cream Sandwich is going to mean that HTC needs to update its skin, and indeed, BGR reports that Sense 4.0 will debut on the Ville.

The news of a qHD Super AMOLED is interesting — HTC's been trending toward the use of Super LCD since it got burned on AMOLED component shortages back in 2010, but it's possible that Samsung has resolved the bottlenecks and HTC is once again confident that it'll be able to keep the supply chain flowing. The promise of a sub-8mm shell is notable, of course — Motorola switched to AMOLED for the 7.1mm Droid RAZR because of its thickness benefits against LCD, and it stands to reason HTC is applying the same logic here.

BGR doesn't give guidance on timing, but it'd stand to reason that we won't see it until 2012 — by all accounts, the Galaxy Nexus will be the only Ice Cream Sandwich game in town for a little while.