Android 3.0 Spotting: Real Or Fake?

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Android fan site Phandroid has posted a questionable picture of an alleged Nexus One running Android 3.0 “Gingerbread.” There are quite a few questions about this picture, and the folks at Phandroid even admit this. As you can see – the ‘About Phone’ screen on Android is showing “Android 3.0″ running on “Nexus One”.

What sets off alarms regarding this image? First, what’s with the guy concealing the phone? The hand casually hold the bottom of the phone while the top of the phone is carefully covered with an old receipt or something. I could see concealing the phone being important if it was some unannounced phone (HTC Scorpion). But the fact the setting says “Nexus One” makes this whole thing totally weird.

Who doesn’t know what the Nexus One looks like? What’s more likely is if this is faked – the guy faking it wanted to make it look like a Google engineer took the picture, hence he taped up his EVO 4G or Droid X and faked the firmware to read 3.0 and Nexus One. Those are easily editable, with some elbow grease, in the phone’s files.

What adds creditability to this story is the fact that popular Android benchmarking tool Linpack for Android reports that they’ve started seeing a few phones running Android 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.2 show up on their benchmarking results. Granted, I’m sure these could be faked as well. But it’s another sign that these things could be out in the wild.

What do you think, real or fake? Sound off in the comments.