subjoin tokyoite: Purported leaked Samsung render shows mix of new, old and nonexistent

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Purported leaked Samsung render shows mix of new, old and nonexistent

Samsung Android smartphone with Ice Cream Sandwich

We might not get the Samsung Galaxy S III at Mobile World Congress, but that doesn't mean there might not be something new to play with Mobile rumormonger Eldar Murtazin today teased the Twitters with the image you see above and the following five words: "Barcelona. Samsung. Press Photo Leaked." We can't speak at all about the validity of the image, so we'll just talk about what we see.

So, yeah. That looks to be some sort of Ice Cream Sandwich with some sort of TouchWiz-esque mash-up. It's different than what we saw in that leaked video from the Galaxy S II in December. It wouldn't greatly surprise us to learn a new phone would have a new version of TouchWiz, nor would it surprise us to learn that the earlier leak was just that -- an early leak and is off the table.

The icons in the dock look like they've been refined a little bit, which you'd expect, right? They've got the ICS app drawer icon on the middle. Glad to see it.

Now the capacitive buttons at the bottom. ... They're done in the style of the on-screen ICS buttons, only they're obviously not on the screen here. The icons are different than what you find on Samsung phones today -- They're the ICS buttons.

Unlike the three-buttoned LG Spectrum, which has menu-home-back, this render goes back-home-multitasking.

And that's that. If you want to get really nit-picky, that calendar entry is for a date that doesn't exist. And that's the old icon for the Android Market, not what you'll see on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Could just be poor rendering, or it could be a sign. And note that this render looks like it borrows heavily from the T-Mobile UK Galaxy S II.

Anyhoo. Maybe it's legit. Maybe it's not. One way to find out: Let's go to Barcelona.

Source: @EldarMurtazin