Although we covered the aborted Lumia 1030 almost two years ago, it seems that images of it are still causing excitement, long past its 'time'. In this case Evan Blass, noted leakster, posting a render, which I believe because it fits right in with what we already knew.

.@anshelsag Don't worry, I'm not that big of a jerk :/ pic.twitter.com/nG9WohEvyo

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) November 8, 2016

And from my original story and analysis:

If this indeed a Lumia 1020 successor then it's worth noting that there's been a change in direction. For starters, the optics are showing (and I presume the leaker hadn't bothered to power up the camera Steve-style), in which case what we're looking at is a phone camera with electronic (i.e. not mechanical) shutter....

What I think we're looking at in this prototype is... an electronic shutter and latest-gen pulse dual LED flash (you'll remember that I covered the development of LED flash in my interview with ex-Nokian Damian Dinning recently).

Why would Nokia abandon Xenon flash, seemingly tied at the hip to imaging excellence on Nokia phones for years (and evangelised by me many times!)? The key is in the tie in with the latest trends in phone imaging, namely multi-shot computational photography. The latest iPhones and Android devices can shoot short bursts of images and then use their fast and powerful chipsets to do interesting things with them (picking out best shots, for example) and we're looking to Lumia Camera 5, due out imminently for Windows Phone, to do something similar on the top specced Lumia 930 and 1520, each with Snapdragon 800 processors. 'Rich Capture', "Dynamic Flash', and so on....

All of which rather rules out Xenon flash. Xenon, you may remember, fires a bright but very short pulse (in the tens of microseconds) and the tie-in with mechanical shutters has traditionally been that you need to re-engineer the sensor to cope with the fast illumination - it's complicated but it's to do with the way the photo pixel charges are read.

There's much more analysis of the original 'leak', from December 2014, in my original story here.

So, in short, there was a 5"+-screened prototype Lumia 1030, probably also with a Snapdragon 800 chipset. Ah, what might have been... eh? In reality, the need to cut down on shipping models and the imaging capabilities of the 930 and 1520 were enough to scotch the release of the 1030. Plus the UI smarts (see the video link below to the 'McLaren') meant that this device was always probably destined to remain at the proto stage...

Mind you, without that 41MP sensor and without the Xenon flash it wouldn't have made half the number of friends that the 1020 made, in my opinion....