The suggestion of a six-camera phone from Sony has surfaced online. At first glance, this is a rumour that seems unlikely - the company took a long time to adopt even two cameras and hasn't really been throwing its weight around in the multi-camera phone stakes.

The source of the rumour is Twitter-based leaker called Max J.

As the source says, there's little to go on and the image is pure imagination, but there's one key fact to consider before dismissing the entire thing as fake news. 

Just after Nokia announced the Nokia 9, its phone with five cameras on the rear, Light - the company who developed the multi-lens system - spent some time talking about some of the companies that it was working with.

The Nokia 9 PureView was very much a launch pad for Light in moving forward the idea of multi-lens camera phones and it was confirmed that it had a solution that other manufacturers could use. Xiaomi was mentioned - and so was Sony.

In this case it wasn't Sony Mobile, it was Sony semiconductor - the people who make the sensors. But there's long been a feeling that Sony Mobile devices are a showcase for Sony's camera components and a device that features this new system isn't too far-fetched. Sony wouldn't be developing the system from scratch - Light learnt a lot through the Nokia development process that it can deploy in other devices. 

Of course there are a lot of "ifs" tied up there. Would Sony Mobile - who hasn't sold a huge number of handsets in recent years - commit the time and money to a six-camera phone when recent track records suggest it might struggle to sell? Nokia's device has also struggled - rather than the new PureView being heralded as the best camera phone out there, it's sort of dropped off the radar. 

We're far from being able to say that this is something that's definitely in the pipeline, but there are pieces of this puzzle out there that mean that it's possible.