In a whirlwind story over the weekend, Engadget posted several images claiming to be Apple’s next generation iPhone, which is widely expected to be releases sometime this summer.
This device was reportedly found on a bar room floor in San Jose, inside of iPhone 3G protective case. The device will no longer boot.
Engadget:
Apparently the phone was found on the floor of a San Jose bar inside of an iPhone 3G case. Right now we don’t have a ton of info on the device in question, but we can tell you that it apparently has a front facing camera (!), 80GB of storage (weird, right?), and isn’t booting at this point (though it was previously, and running an OS that was decidedly new).
Engadget then backed up there reporting by claiming this device closely resembles an iPhone prototype seen in a blurry photo alongside an early iPad prototype. This image originally surfaced just prior to the iPad introduction in January.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame believes this is an actual iPhone prototype, but doubts this is the form-factor Apple is bringing to market in the Summer.
So I called around, and I now believe this is an actual unit from Apple — a unit Apple is very interested in getting back. I am not certain that this looks like the actual production unit Apple intends to ship to consumers. I think it’s a testbed frame — thicker, with visible (un-Apple-like) seams, meant to fit in 3GS cases so as to disguise units out in the wild. It’s hard to tell from the photos. But I think it is the real deal in terms of the internals and display being next-gen iPhone hardware, and the new glass back. Put another way: the front looks legit, the back looks legit, but the sides I’m not sure about. A front-facing camera and 960 × 640 display are two things I believe are slated for the next iPhone. (The “80 GB” of storage sounds like a mistake to me, but who knows? SSD storage typically comes only in even power-of-two increments.)
As for the shiny, mirror-like finish on the back plate, well, Gruber has an answer for that too.
In sum, we have an what appears to be an iPhone prototype/test unit that managed to get out of one of Apple’s secure rooms(Yes, they are real, and the products in that room rarely leave prior to product introduction), wind up in a bar in San Jose, and now it won’t boot(likely remote wiped by a soon-to-be-fired Apple employee). This sounds like fiction, but I, like Gruber, believe this is a legitimate prototype, and we’ll see something similar to it come this summer. However, this is most definitely an inelegant, un-Apple design, that will never be released to the masses.
Images courtesy of Engadget.
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