A group of self-confessed pranksters have admitted that their mock-up of a monster HTC tablet, dubbed the Magnum, doesn’t signal the manufacturer’s release of a super ‘pocket’ PC. However, the web’s now clogged with rumours to the contrary.

The pranksters' HTC Magnum mock-up
Image courtesy of Pocketpt.net

Portuguese website Pocketpt.net this week claimed that the world's tech bloggers, all rushing to spill the beans on the huge HTC Magnum, had been inadvertently hoodwinked.

The site maintains that the HTC machine was made as solely as a “carnival-related joke”. The trouble is, some people now believe that their design was based on a real HTC product.

Given manufacturers’ love of viral marketing, could this ‘prank’ actually be a cunning way of generating interest for a real-life HTC Magnum?

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The Portuguese website also posted a selection of tech specs for the Magnum that, as mouth-watering as they may sound, could be a little far-fetched. For example, the Magnum supposedly has an oversized OLED screen, an 800MHz Marvell CPU, in addition to a fuel cell battery, 80GB hard drive and 2GB of memory.

Its other tech specs do sound more plausible though. Under the Magnum’s shell there’s said to be 3G HSDPA connectivity of up to 7.2Mb/s, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a SiRF Star III GPS chip. The device could run on Windows Mobile 6.1.

The Magnum’s release date has been pencilled in for late 2008 or early 2009, but Register Hardware remains on the fence over whether HTC’s actually working on a similar handset - or if this is all just a joke gone too far.

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