iPhone 5 possibly leaked in its own photo

We’re always fairly skeptical of iPhone leaks that come via cases but sometimes they do turn out to be true. The latest one that has been floating around, starting with Apple.pro, is the leak of an ‘iPhone 5’ back plate showing two holes, ostensibly one for flash and one for the camera.

The image was passed around by most sites but RazorianFly reports that Apple site iFans did a bit more digging into the shot after it noticed what it thought was another iPhone taking the image. An iPhone with a unique dual-hole design.

iFans gave the original photo to two of its readers to independently manipulate to see if they could make those details more clear. What they turned up almost definitely shows a device with two holes in the back plate. What’s not clear however is if this is just a regular iPhone with a custom molded back plate attached.

One of the readers to manipulate the image describes his process here:

In photoshop, I changed the exposure settings to see the reflected camera more clearly. I cropped out the reflected phone, put it on another layer and flipped it. Since it was on a bit of an angle, I worked it till the apple logo was the correct shape and the camera was the correct distance from the logo. I did this by putting the reflected camera on top of the iPhone 5 and made sure the logo was the correct size and the distance from the lens to the logo was correct. What did i find? That dot, which was suspect [sic] is the flash, matches perfectly. It was in fact taken with an iPhone 5. so there is working model out there!

iFans claims that it has heard than an iPhone 5 prototype is missing from one of Foxconn’s production plants in China, where iPhones are manufactured.

We obviously know that someone took the time to make a prototype of the two-hole plate, but that doesn’t mean that they did it with any knowledge of the iPhone 5’s design. This could just be a clever attention grab on the part of the person who leaked the photos.

The original back plate photo was posted on Sina, a Chinese spin on Twitter.