OTOH, if the prototype is legit I wonder if Gizmodo will come to regret publishing the article. Even assuming the phone was 'found' and not stolen as Gruber implies in this morning's Daring Fireball post, the article seems like a pretty clear violation of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Gizmodo knew it was a secret prototype, who it belonged to, and that it had been lost or stolen. I'd love to hear a lawyer's opinion, though.

Even so, couldn't Apple drag their feet and not actually confirm it's theirs until two months from now when they unveil it, and then sue the pants off of Gizmodo?

Yeah, Gizmodo might get sued, they know this. Gawker takes risks like this and it's worth it to them.

http://twitter.com/reckless/status/12440641435

He was indeed previously a copyright attorney.

I like the new design.

It'd be a lot more fun to laugh with a corporation than to have to choose between fanboy and hateboy camps, IMHO.

If anything this might result in "Segway Syndrome" where all the excitement happens long (well, two months or so) before the product is available, and by the time it launches it's yesterday's news.

I don't see what Apple would hope to gain by blowing the reveal on all the features that came from this leak (battery, size, material, resolution, front-camera, camera sensor size, capacity).

What exactly does this leave Steve to reveal? Let OS4 and these specs stew for two months and anything this side of the pizza-delivering-unicorn will draw yawns in June.

OLED screen? Their competitors are already there and userland's reaction has been decidedly mixed.

I honestly can't think of anything else. Pony?

New form factors -- keyboard, flip/clamshell.

Surprising internal specs -- storage, speed.

More screen changes seem unlikely though [1]. The density/resolution is already a huge, attention-grabbing update. Apple tends to parcel those updates out. E.g. they didn't jump straight into HD video capture. They released a slightly-better camera first.

New form factors strike me as about as likely as a convertible tablet MacBook or an attached-keyboard iPad update.

The internal specs... Apple doesn't talk about those much. Surely it'll be even-faster with more flash. But beyond confirmation of an Apple-designed SoC [2], they wouldn't even mention those specs. Let alone hype them to the press.

[1] Does PixelQi even have samples at the pixel-density the update is boasting? Let alone at volume? I honestly don't know.

[2] Something that would have been spoiled by handing the hardware to Gizmodo btw

I think that design philospohy is one of the reasons I prefer the look of MacBooks over pretty much any other laptop I've ever seen. Clean, hard lines with an almost sort of industrial look. Laptops from Gateway, HP, Toshiba, Acer and other manufacturers are starting to use this sloping angular look and mixing of different textures and finishes and the resulting product just looks cheap in my opinion.

I don't currently own any Apple products and my laptop is an Acer and while it performs wonderfully, it's just not very attractive. I know that shouldn't matter in something like a laptop, where you should be concerned with form over function, but I'd gladly a slightly less robust machine if it appealed to me more aesthetically.

If this is indeed a 4G protoyope, I'll be interested to see how much the design changes before the production version.

This has to be by far the earliest and deepest leak Apple has had in the Steve Jobs II era, if not in its history. New iPods have occasionally been blurrily snapped a week or so before the unveiling; ambiguous new MacBook chassis parts have been leaked from factories weeks before the reveal, even the iPad was caught in a photo of its lockup the night before its unveiling.

But here we have a fairly radical redesign of the flagship iPhone, with the actual prototype hardware in full possession of a gadget blog fully two months before it was to be formally shown to the public.

The mood around One Infinite Loop can't be a pleasant one this morning.

On the other hand, is Apple willing to eat the bad press it would get from crushing Gizmodo?

I do think that Engadget took the high rode by passing this opportunity up. Yea, it seems like a big scoop now but in 3 months it won't mean anything.

Why would this be any different, especially given that it's in the case of a company that knowingly partook in illegal trade?

Media players, smartphones, tablets, etc. were all around before Apple's take on them, but once King Jobs lets loose with the golden touch all of the sudden the entire product space comes alive. It's a little creepy.

Skype/iChat Video is used constantly by very large groups of people all over the world: expats, and people who truly cannot afford to travel far (developing countries "middle" class, at internet cafes).

(And it'll be obvious who did, if it were truly an accident.)

Edit: Sorry for the brainfart, I did mean 960x640 (current screen x2).

The iPhone 2G–3GS all have a 163 ppi pixel density, while the iPad has only 132 ppi. Doubling each dimension of the iPhone's 320x480 pixels would result in four times the pixel information across the same area—making for a massive 652 ppi, nearly five times the density of the iPad, and well over twice what is generally considered sufficient for print resolution.

Much more likely is a 480x720 display, which would yield about 360 ppi.

So if existing iPhones are 163ppi and this is 2x as many pixels on each axis in the same space, that would be ~326ppi, not 652.

[EDITED to fix off-by-one errors in the resolutions]

320 / 480 = 0.666666667 480 / 960 = 0.5

EDIT: Gruber says 960 × 640

I bet whoever lost that thing wishes they had signed up for MobileMe...

However, in this case I think Apple has a pretty clear idea of where the device currently is :).

My guess is that making laptops and desktops look like digital cameras makes them stand out as sturdy and simple, while designing a phone with similar goals just makes it fit in.

Where is Apple's Human Factors guy? Tapered end is one of the best ways to deal with the variates in hand sizes, reducing hand strain after long period of holding, and making it appear to be much thinner (and sexier).

Tapered ends is a "feature" not just a look.

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1276732