It hasn’t been much long since the last iPhone 4G drama. Seems like Apple Engineers are really enjoying this. Just to brush up your memory about the last leak, an Apple employee walks into a German bar for a drink with his friends to celebrate his 27th birthday. And what could be a better way to celebrate than leaving your top secret prototype on a bar stool? That was Gray Powell in Redwood City, and the phone ended up with Gizmodo for 5000 dollars.
Now its happening again and this time its Vietnam. Photos and a video turned up today on a Vietnamese site called Taoviet, and the phone looks almost exactly like the Gizmodo one. The differences are small. No screws at the bottom near the dock connector, the micro SIM slot has moved and the back says 16GB instead of XXGB. So this is a newer unit. They’ve pulled it apart too, and inside sits an Apple A4 chip with a white sticker marked N90, which Engadget says is the codename for the next GSM iPhone.
And it wont boot the OS, just a test routine called Bonfire, and the back stamp is still full of XXX placeholders. So how did it get to Vietnam?? The story going round is that a businessman bought it in the US along with an iPad, and the translated comments mention 4000 dollars. We’d take that lightly. Stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: engadget.com, csmonitor.com, fastcompany.com, time.com, gizmodo.com.
