A new leak has come out indicating that the next Google flagship, the Nexus 7, will have two variants upon its launch. The project of creating the next generation Nexus handset is said to have been rewarded to HTC this time around.

According to a leak posted on Chinese social media website Weibo by a reliable tipster, HTC has replaced Huawei in creating the 2016 edition of the Nexus 7. The leak goes on to add that there will be two variants of the Nexus 7 2016: one that is 5 inches in size and another that is 5.5 inches.

This report has yet to be confirmed by Google representatives and should be taken with a grain of salt for the time being.

The first Nexus 7 launched back in 2012 was created by OEM Asus, followed up with a 2013 model which was also built by Asus. In the recent years, other OEMs have also stepped into the picture- Samsung made the Nexus 10, HTC made the Nexus 9, LG made the Nexus 5X and Huawei made the Nexus 6P.

Reports indicate that the next Nexus 7 device will no longer be a tablet but a smartphone, but there are some analysts that believe that the upcoming handsets will not be branded as the Nexus 7. Gotta Be Mobile shares that the upcoming handsets could be named the Nexus 5 (2016) and the Nexus 5 Plus, but the website maintains that that is just a guess.

The old versions of the Nexus 7 were considered to be budget devices, and were not smartphones but tablets. The first generation Nexus 7 sported a 7-inch LED-backlit IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 1,280 pixels, and was powered by the Nvidia Tegra 3.

The 2013 edition of the tablet saw an upgrade with the chipset being improved to a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4Pro and the display resolution increased to 1,200 x 1,920.