That iOS 5 video? Here’s why it’s fake.

We’ve examined the video that began making the rounds just a few hours ago, seemingly displaying an internal build of iOS 5. We think that the phone is most likely an internal prototype of the white iPhone 4, but iOS 5 it isn’t.

It’s incredibly coincidental, if you can call it that, that this purported leak is happening day and date from the leak of the iPhone 4 on Gizmodo last year.

In our examination of the video we’ve come across a few major points that lead us to believe that this is in fact an earlier build of iOS 4.0, not iOS 5 at all. First of all, here’s a screenshot of a partial version number that’s revealed during the video. It’s not completely revealed but it’s clear enough that it begins with a ‘4.0’. UPDATE: Below this you’ll find a new screenshot from the site Tinhte.vn that posted the initial videos. It clearly shows that the phone is running an older build of iOS 4.0, 8A216. For reference, the Gold Master build of iOS 4.0 was 8a293.

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Interestingly, the springboard icons for several of the apps are of the older iOS 3.0 flavor, like the Calculator. This would lead us to believe that this is actually a build that was being tested well before the finalizing of iOS 4.0.

The Settings screens reveal several interesting tidbits. First of all the appearance of the Internal Settings and Carrier Settings menus are clear identifiers of this being an internal testing build.

Now some might point to the fact that there is Facebook integration at the system level, as evidenced by it’s position in the Settings menu, to say that this is a future build of iOS. But we think that it’s crazy to think that Apple hasn’t been testing out Facebook integration extensively, at least internally. Remember that we saw evidence of this on this very date last year. Note the fact that the Facebook icon is squared off, without the rounded-corner glossy mask that is normally applied to iOS icons.

There’s also the matter of size. You may recall that only last month saw the leak of some engineering prototypes of 64GB iPhone 4 models hit the open market. It seems as if this is the same flavor of engineering prototype in white. You can see that the capacity is clearly stated in the Settings app.

Those prototypes also exhibited the same ‘xxxx’ markings in the size and model etching block on the lower back of the phone.

So at this point our conclusions from these videos are that this is an early internal build of iOS 4.0 running on a prototype 64GB white iPhone 4. We’d love to see the deeper Facebook integration of this test OS come to a full version of iOS but I wouldn’t hold your breath until iOS 5 gets previewed at WWDC.

For reference, here are the videos that we examined for this analysis.

Additional reporting by Matt Brian.