14 DAY TRIAL // In the beginning of this article, I must warn you that - if you don't have a good and healthy sense of humor - this is not something that you should read. You'd better head off to something more serious, because the time has come for me to really laugh my brains out. You'll see why in a moment.
Today, after ending my other usual daily tasks, I decided to write down some pieces of news and I was thinking of beginning with something about Vodafone. But, before starting up, I had to check if anybody else from the mobile department at Softpedia is working on the same project and so I asked Cosmin, one of my colleagues, if he was thinking about working on it. He decided to serve me the best subject (by this I mean the one that made me laugh the most) that I've probably ever written by now for Softpedia.
Take a look at the picture placed on the left of the screen (at the bottom of the screen for a bigger one) and you will see a phone that is supposed to be the new Nokia 6639. A "rumor" as it has been classified by some mobile-related websites, and a "fake" as some other people on the Internet say.
At a first glance, this device's pictures fooled my analytic thinking and I just left myself driven by the excitement and began to imagine all the possibilities a handset with all this built-in equipment must open. From the picture, you will notice that it features an integrated Swiss pocket knife with all the goodies included (a scissor, a bottle opener, a little knife and many other things), a huge camera lens covering almost the entire back side of the handset, a cigarette lighter that comes out if you slide the phone's display side ways (where did this idea come out from? James Bond maybe?) and an MP3 player having a striking resemblance with a Sony Ericsson Walkman.
Unfortunately - and I'm saying this because this has come as a proof that the human eye sees only what it wants to see - all these things have proven to be the artwork of a Photoshop faker. First, I have noticed on the right side of the picture that the girl's fingers don't really have a grip on the camera objective, but instead they hold the phone touching a silver corner-like part of the phone, this being something that shouldn't be there. From this fact, I came to the conclusion that all these different instances of the device, pictured in this supposed print screen of the Finnish version of the Nokia website, are all fake and made with a copy/pasting technique applied on a candy-bar form factor mobile handset.
Further more, if you analyze all the logos that appear under the so called phone, you will see a few of them that seem to be misplaced. There shouldn't be a Nikon, a Canon and a HP Invent logo on the same page, because all of them are making digital cameras and Nokia would have the good sense to pick only one and not leave them hit their heads along the way to the final product. Even more, why are the Volkswagen and the Marlboro logos there? From my point of view, this is an overdone fake because the guy who did it should have stopped the copy/pasting thing after ending with the "new" model of cell phone and, why not, he should have done a better job on the camera lens close-up on the right if he wanted to convince somebody and keep the suspense at least for half year from now on. Maybe this should have been even better than realizing this is a complete fake, because we would have had another subject to talk about and a very interesting one if I may add.
Let's go now to the "leaked" specification sheet that I also found on the web. The lie begins by mentioning that this handset should work on GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000. Then we find out that it will run a Symbian 12.0 (!!!!) v16.6z simplified Chinese version, working on a Pentium M-Dothan binuclear 2.0 GHMz, helped by the 512 MB of dual channel DDR2 memory, expandable to 2 GB, and also using an nVIDIA Geforce Go 7800GT video display solution. Did you notice something fishy here? I DID!!!
First of all, the Symbian OS has only reached the 9.3 version that was released on July 12, 2006; secondly, what in the god's name is a binuclear processor??? I suppose this would qualify as a mobile core-duo processor and this should explain it (not). Third, what is a GHMz? Fourth, DDR2 dual channel memory working on what mobile motherboard that I didn't hear about? This doesn't exist yet? I thought so too. The fifth, and the last thing that deepened my conviction that I was looking at a very clumsily-made fake, is the nVIDIA Geforce Go 7800GT video adapter. In whose dreams should this one come on board of a mobile phone? In mine it hasn't arrived yet.
Overall, after the discussions I had with Cosmin and after the "bugs" that I found in these pictures, I can say somebody has tried to fool some of us into believing this could even be true. The fact that amazes me most is that some guys from other websites that write mobile news on a daily basis really bought it and posted this one as a semi-rumor, semi-news thing. Grow up people and learn to find more sources when writing about something that you aren't even sure that it is true!
The conclusion? IT is definitely a FAKE and don't believe it for a single second. One last word for the guy that has gone to all the trouble of conceiving such an elaborated all-in-one device that ended up being disclosed as a fake the first day it came up on the Internet. Nicely done:).
And this is how I began writing news today. It didn't come out as the usual articles I write every day, but it wasn't something that comes up every day either.
Have a nice day and let's meet again when some real phones are launched or "real" rumors about mobile handsets come up.
