Although this project is essentially about the "pre-cambrian" mobile phone design explosion that came to an end with the iPhone and the beginning of the uniform slate style of phone, I'm ending the week with the thing that brought it all to a close, the iPhone. Kind of. This is a dummy phone (aka a display phone for retail sale) for counterfeit iPhones. So it's a fake of a fake. If you look at the details, it's all a bit wrong--even the size is a bit off, which you can't see from the photo--but it's a great copy. I don't know if this was used to sell actual iPhone and that Apple just refused to make dummy phones, or whether it was used to sell fake iPhones (but why would you go through all the trouble to counterfeit an iPhone--with all of the industrial design) just to sell maybe 10K dummy phones? I suspect that it was used to sell fake iPhones, GSM phones with touch screen buttons that looked like apps, but existed outside of the Apple App Store universe.
