3G iPhone: Spy shots from around the world
With only a week couple days to go before Steve Jobs’ June 9 keynote — and with millions of 3G iPhones reportedly shipped and ready to sell — it’s a miracle that nobody outside a small circle of loyal employees, NDA-bound suppliers and (we presume) a few hand-picked reporters has set eyes on one.
Or maybe we have. Since early April, the Apple rumor mill has been steadily grinding out specs and spy photos purporting to represent the new iPhone. Most are surely red herrings or Photoshop creations. But what if one of them is real?
Just in case, here’s a collection of the images that have come across my desk over the past few months. If you’ve seen more — or better — send me the links, and I’ll pop them in. [Subscribers: click here to see what I'm talking about.]
April 3: U.S. iPodObserver.com. This one with a shiny black plastic back looked promising for a couple weeks…
April 17: U.S. winandmac.com. A shot of one of the many iPhone cases available for sale in Hong Kong.
April 30: U.S. iLounge. Third-party manufacturers have already started building products using the specs in the diagram below, according to iLounge. “Photographs matching these details are apparently authentic,” says iLounge’s Jeremy Horwitz, “ones that do not, are not.”
May 5: China, WeiPhone.com. This is the first of several white 3G iPhone spy shots. Note the similarity of the second image to the iLounge specs above.
May 19: U.S. Mobilewhack.com. These crisp, professionally produced images are white and rounded, but lack some of the details that have become conventional wisdom, like the Apple logo and the distinctive base.
May 26: Greece, iphonehellas.gr. These shots, formatted to resemble an Apple ad, bear little resemblance to any of the others, but they do pick up the iLounge color scheme.
May 27: The Netherlands, iPhoneclub.nl. Another white iPhone entry, this one from the Netherlands.
June 1: U.S. iPhone Atlas. This matte-black version was allegedly obtained last week during the filming of a 3G iPhone commercial at Apple’s Fifth Ave store in New York City, but Arnold Kim of MacRumors points out that it’s actually a custom iPhone that’s been knocking around since last December. See here.
June 2: U.S. Cult of Mac. Not a spy shot, but rather Leander Kahney’s way of showing what an iPhone that’s 22% thinner looks like.
June 6: U.S. CrunchGear. Taken from what looks like an Apple or AT&T promotional brochure, this collection of images has, at last, the ring of truth.
Those are the spy shots I’ve seen. Take them all with a grain of salt and note that none has been pulled off the Web by Apple (AAPL) legal.
We’ll update the page with a photo of the real thing, when it arrives.
[Images reposted by kind permission of the Mac Observer, iLounge, MobileWhack, iphonehellas, iPhoneclub, CrunchGear and Engadget.]
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
To be clear, iLounge didn’t claim that specs were sent by Apple to third-party manufacturers; rather, this was the unfounded, incorrect interpretation of our report that “companies overseas have already started working on products” based on details noted in our image: different tapering, a different sensor array, the same screen size, different bottom holes and bezel proportions, and certain colors. Photographs matching these details are apparently authentic; ones that do not, are not.
Another note is that the “EXO Mask” image was later confirmed by the designer, from a company of ill-repute, to be based on guesses rather than actual knowledge. That image and others were floated merely to draw attention to the company’s obscure Chinese exports business, and unfortunately were taken seriously by people who don’t know the history.
ex ped: Thanks for clarifying. I’ll fix the wording of the piece.