14 DAY TRIAL // A finding in the new Photo Stream beta may provide the first piece of visual evidence from Apple that the company’s next-generation iPhone does, indeed, have a bigger screen and a modified home button, among other likely enhancements, both inside and out.
When iCloud is released this fall, iOS 5 customers will be able to take a photo on their iPhone / iPod touch / iPad and have it automatically appear on all their other devices.
“No syncing. No sending. Your photos are just there. Everywhere you want them,” Apple says.
That’s Photo Stream, one of many attractive iCloud features that are currently undergoing rigorous beta testing.
Developers registered with Apple gained access to the latest Photo Stream beta earlier this week, and it didn’t take them long to notice graphics that seemed to resemble an iPhone.
Knowing how Apple likes to use device icons that retain the form factor and design particularities of the real-life thing, developers were naturally intrigued to see the graphics in the above screenshot.
So what the tech savvy types decided to do was to compare these dimensions with those of an iPhone 4 to see what this new phone might look like at real-life scale. Here’s the result, below:
However, it has been reported that there are two new iPhones coming out from Apple this year.
In that respect, there’s a good chance this device is either one of them.
According to 9to5mac, the rendering above may show the smaller, cheaper iPhone we’ve been hearing about for too long to even pay attention to the rumors anymore.
But what if that icon depicts the bigger, fully-revamped, next-generation iPhone 5? Well, in that case, it would look something like the rendering below.
According to the authors, this would fall in the 4-inch screen category, somewhere close to the Samsung Galaxy S line.
And then there’s the old iPhone 5 mockups that compare pretty well to the Photo Stream graphics.
The one that stays true to it the most should be this concept below, which also features a bunch of other design elements that have been rumored for the iPhone 5, including the tapered back shell.
So, what do you think? Has Apple really leaked its own iPhone 5 design in a few pixels that should only aim to symbolize a mobile device in a graphical user interface?
Share your thoughts on this in the comments.