I've got one of them here, of our boy Derrick (really?), eating his toast. Really. By itself, it's not much. Unless you're Derrick or love toast. But it's part of an online mystery unspooling around the iPhone.  Quite the saga behind this. The Mobile Guerilla had been searching online for "taken with an Apple iPhone." Good for MG! This one of Derrick was the first of two posted to Flickr, marked private, then removed. I'm still not exactly clear what happened from there to make them public, if obscure. But whatever it was, I came across them, which means they weren't all that hard to find. Although getting harder. One of the Flickr pages had a comment that I was going back to bookmark, but even the comments have been deleted now. Eerie. [Update: found this in the Google cache, although it too may be gone by the time you get there. This, btw, is where I found out that the name of the dude eating toast is Derrick. Now, for what it's worth, the iPhone-ishness of the image was "verified" by the EXIF info, which can of course be edited...but here it is: Camera: Apple iPhone
Aperture: f/2.8
Orientation: Rotated 90 degrees clockwise [which means the image was saved to disk horizontally oriented, but rotated in the phone, i think]
Date and Time: 2007:04:21 10:23:45
Color Space: sRGB
Tag::EXIF::0xA500: 11/5
Compression: JPEG
Image Width: 1600 pixels
Image Height: 1200 pixels Okay, so how'd the photos get taken in the first place? Has to be a hoax, right? Well, no. Somebody at Apple's been testing it of course. And the taker of the pictures is indeed someone at Apple...or so it seems. The Flickr page with the second photo, also deleted, had a comment from a visitor, also deleted, but copied in a comment elsewhere: "The Flickr account however belongs to an individual who can be tracked down to a LinkedIn profile which reveals that they are a Program Manager at Apple in the Consumer Electronics industry." I took a gander at her LinkedIn profile, and that is indeed what it says. So there ya go. Of course, since her profile is private, she might be funnin' us all the way across the board. Maybe she's just good at Photoshop (not all the EXIF fields are easily or obviously edited), and her boy Derrick just dig toast. Which is probably the case, hoax or not. Then again, maybe she works at Apple. It's happened that Apple (like every company you know) has had a "leak" that they've had to "plug," intended all along to say exactly what it said. In this case, that the iPhone is very much on the way, demonstrated with a feature that we've not previously seen in action. All of that said, I truly hate phones with cameras. Many companies won't allow them on the premises (too easy to document and disseminate things that shouldn't be), ditto gyms (same reason), and one of my favorite pastimes, movie sneak previews (hey, same reason, although this one's especially stupid. The movie's going to be in 1500 theaters in two days! BTW, I'm not a supa-dupa secret insider any more, just an Entertainment Weekly subscriber.) I've even gotten turned away from some concerts, although fewer as time goes by. In any case, I got tired of having to put my phone in a bag at the door...or just flat being turned away...so no camera phones for me. And I'm sure there's an amount of money that can get me to switch to Cingular...but nobody has offered me that much yet. So let's say that ain't you, babe. Don't forget that you can register at Cingular to be notified by email when it's ready. PS. My favorite thing about the iPhone is something that didn't come from Apple, but from Jeff Han and the geniuses at Cornell. PPS. The saga of iPhone sneak previews continues to continue, although this one's a Photoshop job. | 
