The President of HTC America, Jason Mackenzie, took to Twitter again to announce that the company is still on track and is now working with T-Mobile in order to bring the much-anticipated Android 4.3 update to all carrier-branded One handsets. The upgrade is expected to be pushed out over-the-air (OTA) by the “middle” of this week.

Given Samsung’s habit of shamelessly copying everything Apple does, I wasn’t at all surprised to see this morning’s report that the South Korean company had just spent $650 million on a fingerprint scanning firm called FingerPrint Cards. In fact, I simply rolled my eyes when I saw the news and thought, “there’s a surprise.”

But it appears that the whole thing was completely fabricated. The press release that went out announcing the move was false, and both Samsung and FingerPrint Cards have denied the acquisition.

While the BlinkFeed feature on the latest HTC smartphones is a nice idea, the vast majority of people I know with an HTC device never use it — and we’d all love the option to disable it completely. Fortunately, it looks like that option will finally be introduced with Sense 5.5.

An HTC ROM maker has gotten their hands on the Sense 5.5 user interface ahead of its official release, and in addition to BlinkFeed changes, there’s a new “Do Not Disturb” mode to suspend notifications, new camera features, and plenty of other improvements throughout the system.

HTC has today begun issuing invitations to a number of launch events for its new One Max phablet. The first will be held in Hong Kong on Wednesday, October 16 — while another will take place two days later in HTC’s homeland of Taiwan.

HTC has officially published its Android 4.3 expansion plans for its flagship One smartphone. On Friday the President of HTC America, Jason Mackenzie, confirmed on Twitter that the 4.3 Jelly Bean update for AT&T’s carrier-branded HTC One has passed network certification, and will start to push out over-the-air early this week.