Edible Apple

While some people were busy enjoying the beautiful weather this weekend, Engadget was busy gettin’ their scoop on, iPhone HD style.

Here’s how the story unfolded. Engadget on Saturday posted photos of what purports to be the next-gen iPhone. According to the story, the device was found on the floor of a San Jose bar, sneakily nestled inside an iPhone 3G case. The discovered device has a front facing camera and 80GB of storage. Curiously, the device was unable to boot. Sounds fishy, right?

A few hours after the story broke, a mass of web users chimed in that the supposed iPhone in question was in actuality a knockoff iPhone from the streets of Tokyo. And it seemed to make sense. After all, the design of the supposed next-gen iPhone just didn’t seem very Apple-esque. For example, those floating in mid-air volume buttons just don’t seem like a design choice Apple would make. Overall, the entire phone just appears a bit more clunky that what we’re used to with Apple.

So mystery solved, right?

Wrong.

Undeterred, an on-the-ball Engadget editor went back to a leaked photo of the iPad that surfaced hours before Steve Jobs introduced the device to the world and realized that a similar looking device can be seen lurking in the corner of the photo, albeit slightly blurry. Alas! The next-gen iPhone was right under our noses all along.

Now assuming that the above photos are accurate, don’t get discouraged by the slightly bulky and disjointed design. John Gruber tosses hit hat into the ring and notes:

So I called around, and I now believe this is an actual unit from Apple — a unit Apple is very interested in getting back. I am not certain that this looks like the actual production unit Apple intends to ship to consumers. I think it’s a testbed frame — thicker, with visible (un-Apple-like) seams, meant to fit in 3GS cases so as to disguise units out in the wild.

Some more pictures for the road.

And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.