Another lost iPhone prototype?
It's looking like another iPhoneprototype spontaneously vanished from Cupertino's campus, but this one seems like it may have made it all the way out to Vietnam. A Vietnamese forum has posted several pictures of the next-gen iPhone similar in most details to the prototype that Gizmodo bought. According to MacRumors, a Vietnamese businessman bought the prototype iPhone along with an iPad. It's going to be very interesting to find out the rest of that story over the coming days.
Only minor differences exist between this phone and the iPhone Gizmodo showed off: the screws on the bottom near the dock connector have disappeared, the phone's capacity is listed as 16 GB rather than XX GB like on the Gizmodo iPhone, and the battery has a 5.00 watt-hour capacity compared to the Gizmodo iPhone's 5.25 watt-hour battery. In all other respects, it appears to be the same iPhone, complete with a front-facing camera, a flash for the rear camera, micro-SIM slot on the side, and a metallic midsection with curiously visible seams.
Unlike the iPhone Gizmodo got its hands on, this one appears to be functional. The program running onscreen in the photos appears to be a test program of some kind, possibly one designed to test the iPhone's graphics output. The internal components of the phone appear virtually identical to those in the Gizmodo reveal, so this is almost certainly the real deal and not a knockoff.
The photos of the next-gen iPhone have answered many questions, but they've raised even more. What's the back made out of? What resolution is the screen? What's with those very un-Apple-like seams? Does this phone coming in a 16 GB flavor mean that the next-gen iPhone will top out at 32 GB just like the 3GS before it? And most of all: how do people keep getting ahold of these prototypes from one of the most secretive companies on Earth?
Click "Read More" to see a video of the phone from the same source -- though you're probably not going to gain much new information from it unless you speak Vietnamese.
[Via MacRumors]
