Next-gen 3G iPhone pics, or next-gen iPhone iFakes?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 03 May 2008 09:10

Your IT - Mobility

Engadget has re-printed photos from a French iPhone fan site which may – or may not – be legitimate pics of the next-gen iPhone. Real, of fake? You decide.

With only around 5 weeks to go before Steve Jobs theoretically unveils the next iPhone at the WWDC, pictures purporting to be sneak peeks of the next iPhone are only going to continue ‘leaking’ onto the web ever faster.

Engadget has reprinted the photos, but they’re also available at the French iPhone site, with this link taking you to the French page through a Google French to English translation.

Sceptics have denounced the photos as fakes, because the iPhone logo looks a bit crooked, and that fact there is digital fuzziness around the Apple and iPhone logos, but if it really is a true iPhone 3G pic, it would only be a prototype and not necessarily truly indicative of the final build quality.

Some have wondered why a 3G iPhone would turn up in France, but given that France is one of the countries that is officially selling the current 2G iPhone, there’s no particular reason why Apple wouldn’t send at least one 3G iPhone to its telco partner in France, Orange, for testing, if not several.

Some also claim the phone looks suspiciously like an LG model, or that it is a Chinese fake iPhone, several of which I’ve seen for sale on the web at eBay and other places, having copied the iPhone’s icons but slapping them onto Windows Mobile 6 instead, even coming with a built-in stylus.

The same can be said of Nokia N95 fakes, which look the real deal, box and all, even when you turn it on, as seen at various YouTube videos, but once you start using them are clearly not the real deal after all.

So... whether you love the iPhone, or hate it... the onslaught of rumours, fake photos, real photos and more is going to be like a tsunami, and personally, I’m going to love every minute of it.

I’ll also be a bit sad when the real 3G iPhone is released, because my beloved 2G iPhone will instantly be out of date, but then it will hardly be the end of the world, because a 3G iPhone will be top of my ‘must have’ list, as it will be for many.

And on top of all of that, the iPhone 2.0 software will still upgrade the existing iPhone and give it new features, and it will still have the world’s best interface for handheld digital devices.

C’mon Steve. Don’t let us all down, or make us wait too much longer, as we (or some of us anyway) fervently hope that June 9 at the WWDC is 3G iPhone day, a day that will send an even bigger shockwave into the mobile telephony and gadget world than even the 2G iPhone before it!