A little underwhelming if true.
I hope it doesnt have the "faux" 4.65" screen of the Nexus. I've looked at the Nexus screen next to the "4.5" of the Skyrocket, and the skyrockret screen is bigger.
The Nexus just has a long screen which makes the diagonal bigger. Plus the usable area is even less because of the onscreen buttons.
The reason the "faux" 4.65" Nexus screen was overall smaller than the 4.5" of the Skyrocket was due to different aspect ratios.
The 4.65" Nexus screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio (1280x720)
The 4.5" Skyrocket has a 5:3 aspect ratio (800x480)
The inches just measure the diagonal length regardless of screen aspect ratio.
Another way to visualise it would be to compare Widescreen TV's (16:9) to the old cathode ray tv's that were (4:3) or so I think, or something close to that.
But basically a 5" rectangular screen would have a different display area to a 5" square screen.
So nothing "faux" going on there lol.
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The camera samples are underwhelming so hopefully it's just a test software related. If they are the manufacturers of the camera that goes into the phone, assuming they build their range of mobile cameras on the same architecture platform, they could easily go for a straight swap of components with minimal difficulties. This is akin to swapping out a higher spec CPU in the same generational architecture in your PC. E.g swapping out a core i3 for core i5 on the sandybridge platform.
Given that it is a test unit and the external design and hence dimensions of the phone aren't known, they could easily put in a higher capacity battery if needed, though the 2050mAh is a decent improvement in capacity already.
What is disappointing though is the GPU. Unless it's clocked at higher speed or is a multicore variant upgrade over the S2 then we're getting something that is considered outdated. It will do the job..but for a flagship I think people expect a bit more. Even though a straight swap to a higher gen mali might not be difficult, it would be extremely odd to not have it in a testing unit at this point.
What I'm interested about is which model is going to be the S3.
S1= i9000
S2= i9100
GNex= i9250
S3= i9300 or i9500?
And if video with the dummy unit with onscreen buttons is the i9300, then is the other dummy unit with the home button an updated variant of the i9300 or is it really the i9500?