While we’ve already heard that the official iPhone 5 announcement will be next week on October 4th, that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to guess and speculate about the phone until then. According to the folks at MIC Gadget, it looks like the “teardrop-shaped” iPhone 5 is the real deal and should be either the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 4S. They reported that the folks at Foxconn managed to lose an iPhone 5 prototype which made its way out into the wild – which explains all the purported iPhone 5 cases that have been flooding the market in China.
Which makes sense – seeing how all the iPhone 5 cases seem to have the same shape, and it wouldn’t make sense for case manufacturers to make a case for a phone that doesn’t exist. We’re not talking about just one case here, but a whole plethora of them. According to word on the street (of China), the missing prototype was a test model with the finalized iPhone 5 chassis – featuring the tear-drop design.
The person who snaked the phone out of Foxconn wiped the phone’s software, which disabled the GPS hardware which was needed to track it down. The prototype was then apparently sold to a case manufacturer for about $3,100 which leads us to all the cases flooding the market. No word on what happened to the prototype phone, but if the story is true, it should be somewhere out there.
Check out a video showing off the various iPhone 5 cases available in China right now. We can’t say for sure if it’s going to be an accurate representation of what the iPhone 5 will look like, but if it ends up with a tear drop body chassis, we wouldn’t be surprised. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed next week.
Filed in . Read more about Apple Inc, Case, China, iPhone, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, Leaked and Prototype.