Is this the new iPhone 5?
Images published on a Chinese tech blog purportedly show “leaked” photos of the unannounced, unreleased, unavailable Apple iPhone 5 -- the hotly anticipated next version of the device that rewrote the rules for smartphone makers.
The images show a sleek, two-tone design, described by popular tech blog Gizmodo as a shocking change. The site's editors came around, however, admitting that “the first appearance of the stylized, 16/9 design with its unibody … looks kinda beautiful.”
Or did, before pulling down the post -- fooled by the phony knock-offs of a 36-year-old industrial designer.
“It’s been amazing and a lot of fun to see how many 'knowledgable' people fell for them,” Dutch designer Martin Hajek told FoxNews.com. Gizmodo wasn't the only blog to fall for his pictures. They have been posted on about a dozen popular sites so far, including BGR.com, Ubergizmo, Apple Insider, and more.
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“It's a testimony to how embedded Apple has become in our daily life,” he said.
The images are a series of renderings Hajek created and posted to his Flickr site based on leaked images he had seen on various tech websites. He describes his passion for smartphones and tech design as his hobby.
“As a (former) industrial designer I like to play around with 3D modelling and visualizing,” Hajek told FoxNews.com. “Apple's unreleased products lend themselves perfectly to play with.”
Hajek works as an engineer for a large Japanese consumer electronics company he declined to name -- not in the design department but still quite close, he said. He cut his teeth at GRO design, a small design consultancy in the Netherlands, and still lives in Utrecht, “dead-center” in the Netherlands.
“One of my previous employers at GRO design attended the same college in the UK at the same time as Jonathan Ive did,” he noted.
Ive, senior vice president of industrial design at Apple, made waves in the week’s before Apple launched the latest MacBook Pro at its Worldwide Developer Conference. He told London paper the Telegraph that neither the iPad nor the Macintosh nor the iPhone is the most important product the company has ever done.
It's the secret something he’s currently working on that has his heart racing.
“What we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done,” Ive told the paper, when asked what he would like to be remembered for.
So which version of the iPhone does Hajek carry around?
“I’m actually ashamed to say that our company's choice of cellphone is a Blackberry Bold 9780,” he told FoxNews.com, “which I hate with a passion.”
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