Samsung Galaxy ICS smartphone press photo leak faked

Today a photo of a seemingly brand new smartphone from Samsung running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and teasing a Mobile World Congress 2012 release has been leaked. This photos is fake, and here's why: the pixels simply do not line up. As our friend Michael Crider from Android Community makes clear, there's not only Photoshop related breaks in the reality of this image, there's clues in the code we know to be true that cuts down the legitimacy of this beast as well.

The image you're seeing above (and below in the gallery if you'd like a closer look) comes from Eldar Murtazin, a fellow who is often quite vocal about the early looks he gets at devices in the field. He tweeted the image along with the words "Barcelona. Samsung. press photo leaked" and decidedly refrained from speaking any details about the device other than "I dont name this samsung product :-) heh. I think some of you know it..." and that's it.

As Michael Crider explains, there are several ways that you can tell that the whole situation stinks. FIrst, there's been some early builds of the Ice Cream Sandwich update for Galaxy S II devices leaked, each of them legitimate as they can be confirmed to be, and they work with TouchWiz, a version that looks not all that different from the original TouchWiz sitting on the Galaxy S II when it was released – in this case on the USA versions as it relies on the four capacitive button combination at the bottom of the setup. What the photo here shows is a blend of AOSP Android 4.0 and Samsung's TouchWiz, basic Google-made Android 4.0 folders sitting next to Samsung's own widgets and icons.

The device has quite a few graphic artifacts in its white area, this most likely because it was lifted directly from an original Galaxy S II white image, blown out, and cut down the middle so that a modded Ice Cream Sandwich screen could sit in the middle. It's quite simple, folks: this one's a falsehood.

On the other hand, Pocketnow found some Galaxy S II+ benchmark results on An3DBenchXL, so perhaps there IS a new device LIKE what we're seeing here on the way – but this isn't it.

[via Android Community]