Engadget - whose record on these things is usually among the best in the business  - seems to have pulled the trigger on one that's pretty obviously fake. Check it out:

The spec sheet reads like a dream phone (which, again, it very well may be):

  • Gingerbread (Android 2.3)
  • 4.3" or 4.5" (Depending on which part you read) SAMOLED2 screen
  • February release
  • 8 MP Camera
  • 1080p video recording
  • 14.4 Mbps HSPA
  • 1.2 GHz CPU
  • 16 GB of storage
  • Insanely thin

Cool, right? Well, not so fast. Here's the stuff that makes at least the render seem like a mockup done in MSPaint. By a four year old.

  1. There are example icons in the first image, towards the top left. They do not match the icons used on the phone. They seem to be there for no reason other than the fact they're Android icons, and they're terribly rendered.
  2. The image on the screen of the phone doesn't fit the actual screen. It's not even close. Blow up the original to about 400% and you can see the pixels don't match - the imposed image overshoots on the right by a bit, misses a big chunk of the bottom, and doesn't match the angle of the phone (the phone is angled slightly, the image is not).
  3. The phone looks awfully familiar to the iPhone 4 - right down to a metal band around the edge. That metal edge on the iPhone 4 acts as the antenna. The antennagate problems arose because holding the phone causes the two parts separated by the band (below) to touch and drop calls. Probably not a design flaw other companies would want to repeat.
    iphone4_antenna_problem
  4. You know what else matches the iPhone 4? The taskbar.
    iphone4
  5. Check out the leaked image showing the front, back, and side-in-hand (the second one in this post). Notice that the side of the phone seems to be super-shiny chrome now, when it's a matte metal in the other renders? The bottom (thumb-side) also looks to be either white or extremely shiny in the side view as well, but that doesn't match the matte black of the front and back renders.

The sum product of the flaws:

Additions by Artem:

  • DLNA is incorrectly spelled as "DNLA". This abbreviation is often misspelled by people who don't pay attention to the details, aka kiddies making photoshopz. I don't see Samsung making this mistake, period.
  • "Clouding services" is not something Samsung would say either. It's "cloud services." Google fight?
  • Engadget makes it look like they're not sure whether the screen is 4.5" or 4.3" and downplays this gross inconsistency. Let me see - the same shot has "4.3" and "4.5" and we're supposed to think it's legitimate?
  • SAMOLED2 - do you really think this is how we'd find out about the next generation Super AMOLED? In a slide that looks like it was shopped by a 12 year old? Come on.

Are we saying the phone itself is definitely fake? Not at all. The specs certainly seem plausible for an early 2011 flagship device. But these renders are definitely crap in our book. Our suggestion? Read, look, and come to your own conclusion. You're certainly welcome to post your own thoughts either way - we'd love to hear them in the comments below.

[Source: Engadget]