Ladies and gentlemen, you saw it here first. Take your first look at Apple’s new iPod phone!

Unfortunately, you’re sure to be disappointed. Apple included more than a dozen drawings of its new combination "cell phone" and "music player" (or parts of it, at least) in a patent application that was published today.

Alas, when we tried to view the images in Internet Explorer and Firefox, the files stopped downloading partway through, and all we got was a handful of truncated files with all the good bits cut out. Here’s one of the better ones:

Ho there, is that the top of the Golden Gate Bridge?

Curiously, the file format for the truncated images is Quicktime, which is owned by Apple, whose penchant for secrecy is unmatched by anyone this side of North Korea. We don’t usually subscribe to conspiracy theories, but we’re about to break out the tinfoil hats on this one. Has anyone had better luck?

Update: The tinfoil hats can come off, thanks to our intrepid commentator, Dariush. Read more after the jump. 

Apparently we weren’t using the scrollbar to view the entire file. Which is a bit strange, since no scrollbar ever appeared in Quicktime using IE or Firefox despite repeated attempts to load the page at work. Anyway, it’s working fine here at home on my Mac using Safari, which pretty much puts my conspiracy theory to bed.

Unfortunately, as Dariush notes below, the schematics are way too big to fit into the default frame, and I don’t know enough about Quicktime to change it around - if that’s even possible. Doubly unfortunately, what little I can see by mousing around doesn’t shed much light on the "cell phone" part of the project. As I noted in my article today, this patent is really about the assembly, not about the design, so the lack of detail is understandable. Still, as they say in California, it’s a bit of a bummer.

I can’t post any shots at the moment, but  if you want to check the drawings out for yourself, follow this link to the USPTO web site. If any of you tech wizards want to send over some screen grabs, we’d love to see them. Email me at kevin -dot- allison -at- ft -dot- com.

Thanks Dariush!

Update 2: CrunchGear has one of the drawings up.

December 1st, 2006 in Uncategorised | Permalink