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An elongated-looking iPhone showed up in Apple’s WWDC keynote speech — could it be a glimpse at the much-anticipated iPhone 5? Or just a rubbish Photoshop?
The stretched-out smart phone was spied by iDownloadblog, and crops up as Apple explains a new Siri feature whereby car manufacturers can build support for the pompous robot butler right into their vehicles.
You can check out the entire WWDC keynote on Apple’s site — the baton-shaped blower appears at the 79-minute mark, and has the CNET UK office squinting and doing that arm-out paintbrush measurement thing artists do. But could it be genuine? Let’s try and see it from both sides.
Oh lawks it’s the iPhone 5!
Is it even the tiniest bit possible that Apple could accidentally reveal its most anticipated gadget in its own presentation? The taller iPhone depicted in the snap above does — superficially at least — match supposed leaked casings for the new iPhone, which hint at a phone that’s not any wider, but is significantly taller than the iPhone 4S, with a stretched-out display.
That panel is reckoned to measure 4 inches on the diagonal, making for a screen that has a 16:9 aspect ratio when you flip it on its side. I’ve taken the liberty of rotating the image above and using a selection tool constrained to 16:9, and can confirm the screen area of the pictured phone does conform to that aspect ratio.
DA-DA-DUUUM (?)
That’s obviously not the iPhone 5
On the other side of the argument is the fact that the image shown clearly has some funny perspective going on — something you can see by looking at the oval shape of the BMW’s steering wheel, and the dashboard controls just underneath the pictured phone. While it looks elongated, the stretched iPhone look could simply be down to camera-induced confusion.
While a tad blurry, that stretched casing wouldn’t quite match the leaked design — the purported bits of hardware that have been appearing over the last few weeks point to a front-facing camera in the centre of the device, whereas the phone in the snap above looks to have its camera set to the left.
The image could well be a composite — stitched together from lots of different images. In which case the phone presented here could have been stretched out of shape, making this simply a rather shonky Photoshop effort.
For my money, an elongated iPhone is an entirely plausible choice for Apple’s next mobile. But the idea that such a famously secretive company could let its plans be exposed in this fashion is nigh-on unthinkable.
Update: CNET UK Facebook fan Jon P Leebrick has fixed the perspective on the above image, resulting in a much more normal looking white iPhone (that no longer gives a 16:9 screen when we perform the constrained selection tool trick).
Here’s the image with the perspective adjusted, courtesy of a CNET Facebook fan.
What do you think? What’s the next iPhone going to look like? Stick some opinions in the comments or on our Facebook wall.
