On Thursday, March 14, Samsung will unveil the much-anticipated Galaxy S IV at an event in New York City’s Times Square. The Korean company has been very secretive about its next-generation Android flagship — as it was with the Galaxy S III last year — but pictures of the new device may have been leaked ahead of its official debut.

The image you see above was posted to Chinese forum 52 Samsung, and it’s just one of many of that purportedly show the Galaxy S IV. The handset looks a lot like a Galaxy Note II — albeit a slightly smaller version — but according to a benchmark test, its internals are very different.

As far as design goes, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about this device; it looks very similar to Samsung’s previous handsets. In fact, I’ll bet that if this was sat on a table in a restaurant, most people wouldn’t look twice at it. But there are some interesting things to note.

Let’s start with the front: The device clearly isn’t quite as big as the Galaxy Note II, but it looks very similar. It also has slightly thinner bezels down the sides of its display, with very little space separating the display from the edges of the device.

On the back, the LED flash sits below the camera — rather than beside it, like the Galaxy Note II and the Galaxy S III — and the speaker is down in the bottom corner. You’ll also notice there’s no S Pen slot, so this device does not come with a stylus.

It’s on the inside where this handset is most interesting, however. According to a benchmark app — shown running in the images below — this device offers a 1080p display, a quad-core ARMv7 processor with a PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 13-megapixel camera.

It also has an 1,800 mAh battery, and runs Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean. And according to the poster, the device also has dual-SIM functionality, so you can use two SIM cards simultaneously.

The specifications are almost identical to those that surfaced last week. What’s interesting is that both mention a quad-core processor, rather than the eight-core Exynos 5 Octa processor that is expected to come to the Galaxy S IV.

One report has suggested, however, that the Galaxy S IV will come in two versions — one with this new eight-core chip, which will ship in Europe, and another with a quad-core Snapdragon 600 chip, which will ship in the U.S. Samsung did the same thing with the Galaxy S III — shipping a quad-core 3G model in Europe, and a dual-core LTE version in the U.S.

It’s worth noting that there’s a good chance this won’t be the Galaxy S IV’s final design. Samsung will have made all kinds of prototype devices for its tests, and this could be one of them. It certainly doesn’t look fake, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same Galaxy S IV that will be announced on Thursday.

• Source52 Samsung
• ViaSammy Hub