Thar she blows! Nokia EOS camera is gigantic in leaked pics

Look at the size of that thing! The floodgates have opened and a torrent of leaked photos of the Nokia Lumia 'EOS' camera phone has poured across the Web, courtesy of GSMArena, WPDang and ViziLeaks.

The unofficial pics purport to show Nokia's new super high-res camera phone, the promised PureView Windows Phone we've been waiting for since the bonkers 808 PureView blew our minds with its ludicrous 41-megapixel sensor.

And what a camera. If these leaks are real -- and when they come from multiple sources, it lends them more credibility -- this is the first phone since the 808 to have such a huge bulge on the back.

While the photos featured here have 'XX megapixel' on the camera unit, rumour has it the phone will have the same 41-megapixel snapper as its Symbian-powered forebear. PureView software and Carl Zeiss lenses are sure things too.

'EOS' is apparently an internal codename, although others have referred to it as 'Elvis' (possibly because of that paunch-like protrusion?). It won't be called that when it launches, not least because it's a trademark of Canon.

There are plenty of people for whom the camera is the most important feature of a phone, and they've been desperate for Nokia to make a Windows Phone version of the real-deal PureView. Recent high-end Lumias have had fine cameras, but they haven't stood head and shoulders above the rest of the smart phone field. Nokia even had to apologise for faking a video it used in its launch event that was supposedly made by the Lumia 920.

Nokia promised more phones later this year at the launch of the Lumia 925, as well as indicating it was "very interested" in tablets. Heavy leaks like this usually occur just before a new phone is unveiled, but Nokia has no events scheduled, so who knows when we'll see it? WPCentral reckons July, which seems a fair bet.

Even if it were launched tomorrow we'd still have to wait a while before we got our hands on it. The 925, which was revealed in mid-May, still hasn't hit shops and isn't expected to before the end of this month.

So a while to wait yet. In the meantime check out this ace history of Nokia video, and let me know what you think of these leaked pics in the comments, or on our watertight Facebook page.