Leaked Photo Revealing Possible New Samsung Smartphone is a Fake

Don’t get your hopes up people, the purportedly leaked press photo from Eldar Murtazin showing off an apparently new Ice Cream Sandwich Samsung smartphone is a fake and a phoney. A couple of Android sites have called out the picture as nothing more than a poorly falsified image that started life as an actual press image of a white Galaxy S II. What gave the image from Murtazin away as a fake?

Michael Crider from androidcommunity.com writes:

First of all, the Ice Cream Sandwich updates for the Galaxy S II that have been leaked so far look nothing like the screenshot on the device in question. The early builds keep the look and feel of Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz skin intact, including the four-button bottom icon row on the homescreen. The photo above looks like a more even blend of AOSP Android 4.0 and TouchWiz, including the dividing bar and centered app drawer from unmodified Android 4.0. Even so, Samsung’s proprietary widgets and icons are seen hanging out next to the basic Android 4.0 folders.

There’s plenty of other things to suggest that this isn’t the real McCoy. International versions of Samsung’s phones almost always use a center button flanked by two capacitive buttons – the four-button Android standard is only adopted on Samsung’s US phones, which probably wouldn’t be revealed at a Spanish conference. Even the buttons themselves seem wrong, if only because Samsung rarely keeps the same design for the icons as Google’s Android spec recommends. Look closely and you can see errors in the photo itself: bad stitching on the left and right bezels and artifacts below the screen, probably where some modification has taken place to adjust the capacitive buttons.

So what will Samsung revealed at MWC? Well, you can still expect a new range of smartphones and tablets but this will definitely not be one of them.

Shame on you Eldar Murtazin. We’re definitely scrubbing a faker of our source list.