Did Apple leak what the next iPhone will look like?

By Mike Dunn August 31, 2011

Looks like Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook might have a few fires to put out with two big Apple stories coming out today. First we reported on an iPhone prototype being lost in a bar, and now it looks like Apple might have leaked what the next iPhone will look like. The image in question comes from the beta software for Apple’s new Photo Stream service. It is just a simple icon of an iPhone, but it doesn’t look like any iPhone we have seen before.

One of the new features of Apple’s iOS is a service called Photo Stream. The service allows you to share pictures among all sorts of Apple devices and social networks. Apple currently has beta copies of iOS 5 in the hands of developers, and one of them noticed an icon that just didn’t look right.

The icon shows an iPhone with slightly different dimensions than we have seen before. You will notice that the bezels on either side of the screen are smaller, so that the screen takes up more space on the device. You will also notice that the home button now looks more like a rectangle than a circle. When zoomed in the home button is a four pixel by two pixel rectangle. With a larger home button it is possible that Apple is planning on using the home button for gestures as well as clicking.

Months ago the site Thisismynext released a sketch of what they thought the next iPhone would look like, and when compared to this icon it looks almost like an exact match from head on. Most iPhone rumors are taken with a grain of salt around here, but when the source of the rumor is from Apple itself it carries a little more weight.

What do you think, is this what the next iPhone will look like?

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