Rumor: Windows Mobile 6.5 screenshot shenanigans

@grg / 9:20 am PST • November 12, 2008

With Windows Mobile 6.5 now pretty much a sure thing for 2009, the churn of the rumor mill is growing ever louder. Smartphone France has supposedly dug up some screenshots of the new operating system. As these shots will no doubt pop up week after week on forums around the intertubes until 6.5’s eventual release, we’ll go ahead and weigh in now: fake.

Signs of Shenanigans:

Start menu Windows icon: Looks like it was ripped out of the first Google Image Search for “Windows logo” by someone using the polygon selection tool while wearing a blindfold. It’s all sorts of chunked-up, but not in a way that JPEG compression might cause.
Clock, first image: Far, far off center and glowy blue? Pft.
Icons, both images: Why do the WiFi signal strength and battery meter icons switch places from screen to screen? Why is the “Today” icon ripped directly from Mac OS X? Why is the clock icon on the right so awkwardly small and showing a completely different time?
Text margins, both images: The margins of the soft key menu labels are all off – the gap on the left is significantly larger than the one on the right.

There are just too many mistakes that any first year graphic design student would catch. The whole thing just looks cheap and, well, fake.