Nexus Sailfish build.prop Leaked, Confirms 1080p Display and More

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Last night, reputable leaker @EvLeaks asked its followers if releasing/giving the ROM dump for an upcoming Nexus phone would be of any use. Everyone, of course, asked him to do it for teardowns and the new information contained in its lines.

Now, the build.prop has been published, and it reveals a few interesting things about the upcoming Sailfish Nexus device, the smaller of the two alleged Nexus phones coming later this year, and as soon as this August. In case you need a reminder, Sailfish is rumored to be manufactured by HTC, and so far the more credible sources allude to a 5 inch, 1080p AMOLED display, a quad-core processor clocked up to 2GHz, 4GB of RAM, a 2770mAh battery, and 32GB of storage. The phone will, of course, come out with Android Nougat and bring all the features we loved about the developer preview. So, how does this build.prop leak compare to the rumors, and what did we learn?

Assuming the build.prop is legitimate (and we have few reasons to believe otherwise, given @EvLeaks’ track record), we can expect the Sailfish Nexus to have a 1080p display indeed. This is confirmed by the line that reads ro.5F.1cd_density=420 which indicates that the DPI is 420 and functioning in the scale of full HD resolutions. It’s also nice to know that, out of the box, this 5 inch phone will have a more information-dense display as opposed to devices with 480 DPI by default — but even then, remember Nougat lets you tweak this.

It’s also worth pointing out that if the screen is indeed AMOLED, and pentile, the 1080p display will mean a lower effective resolution, meaning that the ~440ppi would be virtually unattainable. Given the Sailfish’s lower screen size, it’d still fare better than devices like the OnePlus 3 in this regard, but the lower resolution does make it sound like this device won’t be quite optimal for Google’s Daydream VR platform debuting with Nougat, even if it meets other display requirements by virtue of its AMOLED panel.

Another interesting tidbit is that the Sailfish will indeed sport a Snapdragon 820, at least by the looks of it and assuming this build.prop has come from a near-final prototype with the final SoC in place. The build.prop reads ro.board.platform=msm8996 , meaning Snadpragon 820, which is in turn consistent with earlier allegations and also puts more skepticism on the rumors suggesting a Snapdragon 821 chipset, which was announced very recently and after many of those rumors had found their way online. However, the Snapdragon 801 back in the day had the same platform name (MSM8974) as the Snapdragon 800, so there is still hope.

Finally, we can see in the line that says ro.build.version.security_patch=2016.08.05 that the security patch for the phone is that of August, next month. This does not necessarily confirm that an August release date is certain, but it is curious given that Nougat was releasing near the end of the Summer (for the U.S.) and various rumors suggested the same.

As a final note of caution, it is possible that this is not the build.prop of the final Nexus Sailfish coming our way sometime in the upcoming months. But by the looks of it the build.prop is consistent with both what you’d expect out of the file and previous leaks and rumors on the matter. If you want to take a deeper look, u/MikeTizen has also posted a cleaned up build.prop for you to read through in case you are interested.

Those are the main takeaways from this build.prop, but you can still take a read through to see if you find anything interesting in the values or annotations. If you find any good gems, let us know in the comments!

Note: Feature image is only a representative render by u/ApSciLeonard.