The Real iPhone 4G Surfaces?
While the channel-news-world slept over the weekend, this blogger was up and catching the latest on a weekend development regarding an unusual new iPhone. At first, it was dismissed as a fake, then a Japanese counterfeit, but now it looks like it’s actually legitimate. Is this Apple’s biggest leak yet?
As you can see from the picture, gone is that bubble-back design, replaced with the new round-edged boxy industrial frame that is proliferating through all of Apple’s products.
Gizmodo some how got their hands on it (after rumors that it was found in a San Jose bar with an iPhone 3G ‘styled’ case on it), and tore the sucker down, and here’s what they found:
Apple has their name all over the product, from components to circuit board. What’s more, it shows up as an iPhone when plugged into a Mac under System Profiler. Only the device ID is different. The screen has a noticeably larger resolution (observed from a ‘crisper’ image of a USB cable and iTunes logo that shows up for a requested sync in recovery mode.) Sadly, the phone won’t come out of recovery mode, (locked by Apple most likely) but those close with the source claim that it was running iPhone OS 4.
It’s got a front facing camera, a flash on the rear camera, a smaller style SIM-card and a user-replaceable battery. What’s more, official leaked iPad images seem to show a blurry iPhone 4G that matches the one Gizmodo got their hand on…(look in the corner).
There’s a LOT of evidence this thing came straight from Cupertino labs. But…
Skeptics, like myself, while finding this phone clearly ‘new’ and nearly ‘official’ don’t presume this is the final result for the iPhone 4G. There’s a general feeling by some that this isn’t close to a finished product. There are visible ‘breaks’ in the aluminum, and they don’t seem too aesthetically pleasing. It seems odd for Apple to suddenly offer a user-replaceable battery while their entire product line has shifted to non-user-replaceable batteries with longer battery life.
Every once in a blue moon, e-bay pops up with a Apple prototype of a device. There was a prototype of the first iPhone that went for sale, along with a prototype of the MacBook Air that was fitted with a carbon fiber bottom (instead of aluminum). Typically, the prototypes don’t look 100% like their consumer counterparts. So perhaps, we’re looking at a very nearly completed product, but certainly not a production model.
I find the design slightly uninspiring, too. I do like the flat back and refreshed ‘boxy’ look, but something tells me this isn’t Johnny Ive’s final design. I expect some serious tweaks that makes this iPhone — like all the iPhones before it — look like a seamless piece of technology; a solid brick that seems to fit all the components together impossibly perfect. And while Gizmodo commented that the internals of the device were snugly and perfectly fitted together…this blogger still has his doubts.
No doubt it came from Apple, but will it look like that in June? We’ll have to wait and see.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.
