Leaked Sony Windows Phone is fake

Since it’s fake, we’d rather not report on it, but knowing that the blogosphere doesn’t like to check facts and everything, we thought we’d set the record straight. No, those leaked pictures of a Windows Phone from Sony are fake.

How can we tell? Well, the Live Tiles seem to be off, for sure. The icons, spacing etc. look weird, but there’s some hard, conclusive evidence to tell this is not a real Windows Phone 7 device: notice on the messaging tile, the emoticon is tilted 90° – that is, it’s aligned horizontally, and not vertically like it usually is. Probably just an Xperia Arc running a WP7 launcher skin, with the icons for the hardware buttons concealed.

With that out of the way, the device still looks pretty good, to be honest. Sony has always been known for great industrial design, and even though they haven’t been as successful in recent years, what has held them back was always their custom UI and all that stuff – with Windows Phone, they wouldn’t have these problems, and could instead fully focuse on what they’re doing best, building the hardware. We’ve previously seen a real Windows Phone from Sony with hardware keyboard, so they definitely have been considering it at some point.