Rumors

A photo of a leaked GameStop circular hints at a brand-new black Wii bundle coming in May. Apparently an employee of the game retailer tipped off Kotaku saying the advertisement came along with instructions to hold the information until May 4.

Nintendo has told us the company refuses to comment on rumor or speculation, but it does seem a bit ridiculous that someone would go out of his way to forge an ad detailing the black console. Fanning the flames even more comes word that a subsequent corporate e-mail was sent out warning GameSpot employees to keep information about products … Read more

San Mateo County prosecutors are defending the search of a Gizmodo editor's home and seizure of his computers that are part of a criminal investigation into an iPhone prototype lost by an Apple employee.

Stephen Wagstaffe, chief deputy district attorney, told CNET on Tuesday evening that prosecutors had considered whether reporter shield laws applied to the search and seizure aimed at the gadget blog--and decided to proceed after carefully reviewing the rules.

"My prosecutor who is handling it considered this issue right off the bat when it was being brought into him and had some good reasons why … Read more

Police have identified the unnamed person who found the prototype iPhone lost by an Apple engineer in a Silicon Valley bar last month, a prosecutor confirmed to CNET on Tuesday.

Investigators have interviewed the person who sold the prototype to Gizmodo for $5,000, Stephen Wagstaffe, chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, said in a telephone interview. He did not disclose the name of the person, and it wasn't clear if whoever found the "4G" phone was responsible for selling it or how police found the person.

The phone has been the subject of massive … Read more

The criminal investigation into Apple's errant iPhone prototype took a new twist this week, when Gawker Media claimed that the warrant used by police to search an editor's home was invalid.

It's clear that federal and state law generally provides journalists--even gadget bloggers--with substantial protections by curbing searches of their employees' workspaces. But it's equally clear that journalists suspected of criminal activity do not benefit from the legal shields that newspapers and broadcast media have painstakingly erected over the last half-century.

No less an authority than a California appeals court has ruled that the state's … Read more

The criminal probe into Apple's errant iPhone prototype is expected to broaden, a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation told CNET.

San Mateo County's investigation may expand beyond Gawker Media's Gizmodo, which acknowledged buying the prototype for $5,000, and the unknown person who sold it to the gadget blog, the source said. Police obtained a warrant to search a Gizmodo editor's home on Friday evening. CNET was the first to report an investigation was under way earlier that day.

One reason for an expanded investigation is obvious: law enforcement wants to learn who … Read more

Editor's note: Click here for a more current story on the lost iPhone prototype investigation.

Silicon Valley police are investigating what appears to be a lost Apple iPhone prototype purchased by a gadget blog, a transaction that may have violated criminal laws, a law enforcement official told CNET on Friday.

Apple has spoken to local police about the incident and the investigation is believed to be headed by a computer crime task force led by the Santa Clara County district attorney's office, the source said. Apple's Cupertino headquarters is in Santa Clara County, about 40 miles south … Read more

The gadget world is buzzing today over a supposed iPhone 4G that both Engadget and Gizmodo say was discovered on a bathroom floor in a bar in California. Gizmodo says it has even procured the hardware for a more detailed hands-on overview of what we can expect from the next iPhone.

It's hard to approach this discovery without some amount of skepticism, but we have to admit that some of the evidence lines up with what we have been expecting from the next iPhone. Here, we detail which specs align with our predictions and which make us wonder whether this hardware leak could be a decoy.

The specs we found believable:

Micro SIM card instead of a regular SIM card. We already know that the iPad with 3G will use micro SIM cards instead of normal SIM cards, and we don't know of other cell phone companies that use this new SIM card format.

Front-facing camera. Because of the recently announced VoIP multitasking abilities in iPhone OS 4, the front-facing camera is a natural fit for Skype users or anyone who wants to use video chat.

What looks like an IPS display, similar to the one on the iPad. We did speculate that Apple would have a better display on the next iPhone, and we didn't think Apple would leap on the OLED bandwagon, so again, this seems to be in line with expectations.

Larger battery. Longer battery life is a big issue, and we definitely expected some kind of hardware revision to ensure that to be the case.

The placement of the home button is similar to that on the iPhone 3GS, thus retaining the same iPhone look and feel.

Now for the details that make us wonder if this is either a decoy or just an early prototype:… Read more

People lose their iPhones all the time. But it's not often that a super-secret prototype of a not-yet-released iPhone is carelessly left on the floor of a local drinking establishment.

But apparently that's what happened, according to two different gadget blogs. That this would happen to a company like Apple, which takes secrecy and security of its products very seriously, is surprising. Apple has not yet said there even is an iPhone 4G--although it's a safe bet there will be based on the pattern of the past three years. Steve Jobs has said that new iPhone software is coming "this summer," but the company has stopped short of acknowledging that new hardware is in the works.

Normally the first time we see a new Apple product it is in Jobs' hands while standing on a stage in front of an audience of geeks and journalists. So what happened this time?

To back up: Over the weekend, Engadget posted photos of what it said might be the iPhone 4G, or the next-generation version of Apple's phone. It said it was found on the floor of a bar in San Jose, Calif., and a tipster sent the photos into the gadget blog for posting. The pictures are sort of blurry and the device is never shown powered up, so it didn't seem that hard to dismiss as yet another fake iPhone knockoff.

Flash forward to Monday morning. Engadget's rival blog, Gizmodo, ups the ante with its own photos and video of what appears to be the same device, though it claims it's from "someone" who found it on the floor of a bar in Redwood City, Calif. How Gizmodo got its hands on it is unclear.

There have been several suggestions that Gizmodo's parent company, Gawker Media, bought it. A tweet from Gawker boss Nick Denton on Monday appeared to confirm Gawker's willingness to pay for stories, though Gizmodo hasn't yet responded to a request for comment. The company generated much publicity when Gizmodo's sister blog Valleywag announced a bounty on early access to an iPad. Denton has also considered paying for paparazzi-style photographs of sports stars for its sports blog Deadspin. It's not impossible that the company saw Engadget's pics and tracked down the person who sent it in and paid him or her for it.

Blogger John Gruber at DaringFireball.net says that, according to his contacts at Apple, the purported iPhone 4G is considered "stolen" by Apple.

Apple has not responded to a request for comment.

Assuming both Engadget and Gizmodo discovered the same device, there are some odd inconsistencies in the stories, such as the discrepancy between being lost at a bar in San Jose and Redwood City, as well as claims of seeing the device powered on, but not showing photos of it. Also, Gizmodo says it took the thing apart, yet it didn't post photos of the processor or the storage.

But more importantly, how did this happen?… Read more

Rumors that Bing was to be the default search engine in an upcoming iPhone OS update can continue to be filed in the rumor bin, at least based on the developer preview release of OS 4.

Bing is still nowhere to be seen in the iPhone's Safari app, or anywhere else in the preview version of the OS. Besides Google, which remains the default search engine, the only other option remains Yahoo.

It's still possible that the Apple/Microsoft deal could be under way though. And if that's the case, it could just as easily make it … Read more