Sony's Lollipop build may have just been spotted if these leaked shots are legit

Sony has hit a rough patch in the past few years, and its latest lament seems to be the mobile space. While some of us waxed poetic this past Friday on the matter, it’s important to remember that Sony does, in fact, have a new flaghship in the works, the Xperia Z4. This device has a lot of potential, especially if Sony does hold to an annual release cycle, thus ensuring that “new” is less relative and more long-lasting.

A Chinese website is claiming to have screen captures of the Xperia Z4 Dual, known by the working title “Ivy”. While the physical body of the hardware might be missing, what’s of greater interest here is the visual nature of Sony’s take on Android Lollipop, specifically 5.0.2. As you can see in the About phone capture above, the hardware is running on a Qualcomm MSM8994, which our readers might be aware, is also known as the Snapdragon 810, which is currently powering the already-released LG G Flex 2.

Moving onto the next screen capture, we have the alleged Settings screen:

Pay particular interest to the significant editing Sony has apparently done to the icons depicting each of the setting toggles, which have an almost cartoonish nature to them. Also notice the odd mosaic-esque background color behind each line of text; it’s especially noticable on the blue “Settings” and “Wireless & Networks” text: this almost looks like the original language was sloppily erased and then new text placed on top of it.

Here we have the dialer:

Nothing major to speak of here, save for the same odd artefacts behind each bit of text. If this is indeed the dialer it would seemingly mesh well with the Material Design theme Google went for as it’s quite plain and simple. Still different from the stock experience however.

The final screen capture:

The world clock screen is also simplistic with the minimal color scheme and bright orange “add” button on the bottom right corner.

Assuming these images are in fact, legitimate, it is of particular interest that Sony has chosen to use a different “home” button for the on-screen navigation keys at the bottom. The AOSP build of Lollipop uses a circle, and when combined with the triangle and square flanking either side, gave rise to frequent joking of the “Playstation” buttons Google had chosen. Suffice to say, however, that the home icon is instantly more recognizable (if not skeuomorphic in its own way) than an unassuming circle.

And there you have it: a quick run through of the four leaked shots. Regardless of if they are legitimate or not, there is a clear influence of Material Design at play, though especially with the settings image, things look like Sony has an almost HTCSense-level of tweaking going on with some things.