An anonymous tipster with great connections has hinted that HTC’s monster in the closet, the Snapdragon-packing beast now known as Passion, is a GSM handset. Now some of you may have suspected this already as DroidDog readers discussed it in the comments of that first big photo leak post. PhoneDog and Mobile Crunch have basically affirmed those suspicions now. My tipster spoke up before the PD and MC posts went up, so this is starting to look pretty good. But wait… there’s more.

The rumors of a launch before January first? Confirmed. Yes! Great! What else? It’s probably not headed to AT&T or T-Mobile. Huh? Will HTC be selling a 1 GHz beast direct and unlocked in the States? The photo below shows a phone connected to US 3G (see Noah’s post, linked above, for details on the different icons as well as these BGR snaps of 2.0 – new notification icons included – that are causing confusion on this front). If the image below is what people are saying it is, then Passion is definitely a US product. So where does that leave us? Maybe on a wild goose chase of rumor and speculation, but possibly with clues of something completely different. I doubt HTC would finance, which means I couldn’t buy this one direct. But I wouldn’t be surprized if they wanted to do something big for their first American Snapdragon. What that could be is anybody’s guess.