HTC said to be finally ditching the black branded bar with the One M10 "Perfume"

According to famous leakster Evan Blass, the upcoming HTC One M10 "Perfume" will finally ditch the black HTC bar that previous One M handsets featured below the display.

Previously, HTC said that the black bar actually hides the BoomSound speaker chamber and that without it, its recent flagships would have offered a lesser audio quality. This new info correlates well with some previous rumors which suggested that HTC has decided not to equip the One M10 with BoomSound stereo speakers.

On earlier HTC flagship smartphones, such as the original HTC One that you can see below, the black branded bar integrated capacitive buttons, thus serving a utilitarian purpose:

Although it was widely appreciated for its design and build quality, the HTC One M8 - which launched back in 2013 - also introduced a rather weird design feature: a black bar with the company logo just below the display. On One M8, the first HTC M-series flagship to ditch the capacitive buttons in favour of on-screen navigational buttons, the black strip served no such functionality, and many fans considered this to be a waste of space:

The dreaded black branded bar made yet another appearance on last year's One M9, a handset which maintained the same overall styling as the One M8: