The folks of Mobileaks.nl have published a supposedly official render of the Nexus 5, once again rumored to be made by LG, although odds are very small of that happening. I must say I’m not a huge fan of this design, that I consider bulky, not modern and its upper and lower side don’t seem inspired at all.
They’re too sharp and rounded at the same time, if you know what I mean. Also, the placement of the back speaker is kind of odd and the camera area looks… old. I can’t seem to find the earpiece at the front of the device and the volume buttons are totally unrealistic. The only appealing thing about this model, aside from the strange inclusion of the Walkman app are its high end specs.
Those include a 5.2 inch OLED display with a Full HD resolution, 3 GB of RAM, a 16 megapixel camera with OmniVision sensor and a 2.1 megapixel front camera. There’s also a 3300 mAh battery inside and a Snapdragon 800 quad core CPU at 2.3 GHz as the ticker. I’m 99.99% sure that this is just a fake render… how about you?
[via MobiLeaks.nl]

Meizu has a bunch of very cute phones and now they’re preparing for a new device release, the Meizu MX3, that’s expected at some point in 2014. Of course, concepts of the device have appeared and they’re shown below. Meizu has the habit of updating handsets at the end of the year, so that’s when we’ll find out how realistic the concepts are. Rumors say that Meizu plans to introduce a larger phone with a very narrow bezel, edge to edge display and it could even feature a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 8 core processor. A 5.1 inch Full HD screen should also be present, according to rumors, plus a 13 megapixel camera obviously, since that’s a modern hardware feature nowadays. The home button is quite similar to the one of the MX2 and the Meizu smart bar on screen navigation will also be present.
Meizu MX3 does look kind of bulky and I’m sure that its maker wants to make a very thin smartphone, since it’s famous for that. The front side reminds me of a Huawei tablet for some reason, while the plastic back makes me think of the new wave of TCL Alcatel phones.

After the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Nexus 5 is the most rendered phone in 2013, I’ll give you that much. Each and every designer is having a go, putting brands like LG, HTC, Sony, Samsung or others attached to the Nexus 5 project. Today Suman Chatterjee gives this idea a spin and created the new Nexus by HTC. The result is a 4.9 inch Full HD smartphone with a Snapdragon 800 quad core 2.3 GHz processor and Android Key Lime Pie as the OS. Nexus 5 has 3 GB of RAM, 32/64 GB of storage, a 16 megapixel camera with autofocus and a 3 megapixel front camera. We’ve also got a Li-Polymer battery, that’s removable and offers a 2800 mAh capacity.
The design seems greatly inspired by the HTC, although the two capacity buttons are replaced by 2 virtual ones and there’s an interesting app selection in the middle of the screen. The display also seems to have even smaller bezels than on the HTC One…
[Thanks Suman Chatterjee]

Deepak Ahuja is certainly one of the most prolific concept phone designers lately and now he sent us a new mockup, the one of the Apple iPhone 5S. The handset runs iOS 7.0 and it’s rather slim and has an impressively small width. It packs a 4.3 inch LED backlit IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1280 pixels. There’s also a 12 megapixel camera on board, placed at the back and also offering a LED flash. We’ve also got a 2.1 megapixel front camera with 720p 30 FPS video capture. There’s a quad core 1.2 GHz CPU inside and a PowerVR SGX543 MP3 GPU to take care of the gaming.
The chipset type is Apple A6 and the storage versions are 16/32/64 GB, accompanied by 2 GB of RAM. The iPhone 5S measures 7.3 mm in thickness, weighs 111 grams and supports 4G LTE on a nano SIM. There’s a Li-Ion 2800 mAh battery powering up the machine and the iPhone 5S is available in black and white. Will this be real? We’ll see…
[Thanks Deepak Ahuja]

Designer Christophe Simeon has sent us a great concept, the Samsung Galaxy NxT, which is basically a 5.5 inch phablet with a sliding keyboard mechanism. It reminds me of the ASUS Eee Pad Slider and the Nokia E7, as far as the sliding mechanism goes. The device is also pretty hot and it does look a bit like the Galaxy S4 and S3. The specs are pretty good and the way the QWERTY keyboard is integrated is very original and discrete. Samsung Galaxy NxT measures 8.6 mm, which is very good for a QWERTY keyboard phone. Its case uses titanium, glass and rubber and it also includes 2 microphones, stereo speakers and a 5.55 inch Full HD display.
At the back there’s a 16 megapixel camera with Xenon flash and upfront a 3 megapixel shooter, both with infrared illuminator. We’ve also got the usual Bluetooth 4.0, DLNA, microSD and NFC and microHDMI (bi directional) is also here. Qi inductive charging is present and sadly the designer didn’t mention the CPU or RAM. I guess it’s probably an Exynos 5 Octa and 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, if you ask me.
The keyboard is a 4 row QWERTY, that’s very compact and user friendly. Quite a fantastic work from Cristophe, so congrats on that! There are more Samsung concepts from him, so stay tuned!

Suman Chatterjee sent us a teaser of an upcoming Micromax phone two weeks ago and accepted names for this device. Now he’s back with the finalized unit, that’s called Micromax Nova and runs on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean.
The handset has an elongated design, with rounded corners and proeminent On/OFF and volume buttons. It adopts 3 capacitive buttons below the display and its frame around the screen seems metallic. The device incorporates a 4.8 inch 1080p display and an Intel dual core Atom Clover Trail+ processor, as well as 2 GB of RAM. We’ve also got the Mali T604 GPU, the same one from the Cortex A15 Nexus 10 tablet.
As far as memory goes, we’ve got either 16 or 32 GB of storage, depending on your preference. At the back there’s a 13 megapixel camera and upfront a 2 megapixel shooter. Finally, Suman Chatterjee included here a 2800 mAh battery and said that this smartphone will not only be launched in India, but also Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Brazil and Sri-Lanka.
[thanks Suman Chatterjee]

We have seen at least half a dozen Microsoft Surface phone concepts and today we get one more, courtesy of Michael Matteo. He envisioned the Microsoft TacTile, a Surface smartphone pictured below, in several shots.
These are renders of a person who likes Windows Phone and wants to show off his design skills. He’s got a proprietary port on board, a metallic backing with interesting ridges, as well as rubber edges, or something similar. The backplate of the device is CNC machined out of magnesium, like the Surface tablet. On the colored version, the alloy is anodized, apparently.
We’re dealing with a metallic phone with good grip and the windows Logo at the back is backlit, for an unique identity of the product. The front capacitive buttons and the logo are able to illuminate any color in the RG spectrum. I have to say that the colored versions of this Surface Phone render look kind of hot, youthful and would even give the Lumias a hard time. Nothing about specs, sadly…