Prototype iPhone firmware posted, leaves more questions than answers

The physical devices have been unceremoniously pulled off eBay, yes, but thankfully, their spirit lives on thanks to ripped binaries now circulating the interwebs. It seems that no one has quite figured out how to run the pre-pro iPhone firmware outright, but we're sure it's just a matter of time. While we twiddle our thumbs, one of the firmware's more interesting nuggets -- the colorfully-named skankphone.app -- has apparently been successfully launched from an iPhone 3G's home screen, briefly producing this unfortunate image for your viewing enjoyment before booting you back out. This is all either an elaborate hoax crafted by some of the crazier minds in the iPhone hacking community, or there are some awfully sick puppies in Cupertino's iPhone team -- but either way, we're finding ourselves wanting more. What?

[Thanks, Marcel]

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 1:15AM]

This guy is probably an engineer working on the iPhone, and someone did this as a joke!

haha

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 1:37AM]

That's a guy from one of the "I'm a Mac" ads. After the Mac guy trots out his home video (some supermodel) the Windows guy says "I made a movie too" and this guy in drag walks out.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 5:33AM]

Classy advertising at it's best ;p

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:15AM]

gisele bundchen

[Jamar Posted Mar 12th 2009 3:34AM]

Alternatively, Skankphone is supposed to be the old Springboard. If you don't boot it as such (at boot time instead of as a plain old application), it shows like that.

[kompulsive Posted Mar 12th 2009 7:38AM]

NOODZ PLZ!

MOAR!

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 12th 2009 10:47AM]

thats easy the i-phone was mad for guy folks .

[zman Posted Mar 13th 2009 9:40PM]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNnX6XRQBec

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 3:44PM]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=7268397&postcount=154

Interesting. SkankPhone launched on iPhone 2G.