Don’t worry, the Samsung Galaxy S IV won’t look like an iPad mini with the camera relocated after all. Famed Android device leaker Evleaks tweeted out a render he suggested was the upcoming Galaxy S IV, but it turns out there was less to the image than meets the eye: it was in fact the work of an Expansys web designer, creating a placeholder image based on exactly no insider information, for illustration purposes only.
Now normally, a bad leak isn’t a story so much as it is an expected outcome of obsessively watching the ‘nets for the slightest hint of the next big thing. But in this case, the source was Evleaks, the masked and anonymous leaker of some of the most reliable unverified pre-release information on the web. Seeing that kind of track record marred with a gaffe this big is enough to shake your faith in the whole dirty business.
The original Evleaks tweet where he shared the image to begin with is long gone, but it survives in retweets and images saved by other publications. For its part, Expansys says it has been engaged in a massive effort via its social media channels to spread the word about the true source of the pics – even going so far as to claim that Evleaks “stole them and added his own logo.” We’ve heard separately that the image wasn’t stolen by Evleaks directly, but came in through their usual channels. Over the course of this morning, the Expansys social media accounts have been actively responding to RTs of the original Evleaks post in order to direct people to the correct source.
Really, this is a good thing, because I didn’t want that phone depicted in the render anyways. But is it the end of an era for the normally solid Evleaks? Or just a one time slip up? Whatever the case, a little more transparency than deleting the tweet and pretending it never happened probably isn’t the best course of action.