Not terribly exciting news, but images of the purported ‘cheap’ (we prefer the word ‘entry-level’) Apple iPhone have been leaked by iPhone case maker Tactus on its official blog This ups the ante of previous leaked images from French website Nowherelse.fr.
The fully-assembled budget iPhone is pictured together with an iPhone 5 as comparison. It terms of dimensions, the budget version is slightly thicker than the iPhone 5 at around 9mm thick, and at 120mm wide, it’s not a huge difference to its more expensive brother either. Being close in dimensions, it is believed the budget iPhone will come with a similar 4-inch Retina Display.
The telling images also detail the phone’s main camera with LED flash on the rear, front camera and familiar round physical home button on the front; volume and mute buttons on the side; speaker grill, 3.5mm audio jack and lightning port at the bottom.
The worrying bit is the shiny polycarbonate shell. It brings us back to the glory days of the iPhone 3G and 3GS, until Apple decided it had enough of the plastic crap. Samsung might turn around and say now, “See, there’s nothing wrong with plastic!”
The images show a white variant but it is widely believed that Apple will go all Lumia with the budget iPhone, offering it in an assortment of colours. Some believe colours will be sampled from iOS 7.
Clues point to a September launch just in time for the holiday season, where Apple is also expected to roll out new hardware including a new 9.7 iPad.
A mid-range price of US$450 to US$550 sans contract is rumoured.
Source: Tactus
