According to a new update from SF Weekly, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield has confirmed that four SFPD officers “assisted” two Apple investigators in searching the house and car of Sergio Calderòn for an allegedly lost iPhone 5 prototype.

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio Calderón, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers “did not go inside the house,” but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured Calderón’s home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and Calderón denies that he ever possessed it.

In a contradicting report posted earlier today, SF Weekly claimed that Apple personnel may have posed as police officers in an effort of searching the man’s house for a phone located through GPS signal, but never restored. Calderòn told SF Weekly in an exclusive interview that six badge-wearing individuals came to his place at around 6 PM, but didn’t identified as being employed by Apple. One man, who identified himself as “Tony”, gave Calderòn his phone number. The number was later associated to Anthony Colon, an investigator employed by Apple whose LinkedIn profile was subsequently deleted from the social networking website.

The visitors also allegedly threatened him and his family, asking questions about their immigration status. “One of the officers is like, ‘Is everyone in this house an American citizen?’ They said we were all going to get into trouble,” Calderón said.

Calderòn says he was under the impression that they were all police officers, as the two people who searched his place were part of a group who stood outside and identified themselves as SFPD officials. Whereas a first report indicated SFPD had no records of such investigation, the fact that SFPD sent “plainclothes” officers with badges may check out with today’s update.

Yesterday:

There’s just one problem: SFPD spokesman Officer Albie Esparza says no records exist of any such activity by SFPD inspectors.

“I talked to CNET” reporter Declan McCullagh, Esparza tells SF Weekly. “I don’t know who his source is, but we don’t have any record of any such an investigation going on at this point.

Today:

Contradicting past statements that no records exist of police involvement in the search for the lost prototype, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that “three or four” SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man’s home.

Dangerfield said he plans to contact Calderòn for further questions about the incident. As it’s unclear who knocked on Calderòn’s door, and how the six individuals identified themselves prior to entering the man’s house, SFPD needs to investigate the situation — as pointed out by SF Weekly, impersonation of a police officer is a misdemeanor in California with up to a year of a jail time.

CNET was first to report on a second iPhone prototype lost in a bar, after last year’s leak of an iPhone 4 unit to Gawker Media’s technology blog Gizmodo months ahead of the device’s release. So far, Apple hasn’t commented on the story.

As reported  by CNET, in a bizarre turn of events it appears Apple may have lost another unreleased iPhone model in a bar, this time at the Cava22 in San Francisco. According to the website, Apple never filed a police report based on such loss, likely from an employee field-testing the unit, although it ”sparked a scramble by Apple security” in an effort to recover it quickly. The device, CNET says, was lost in July. Rumors surrounding the next-generation iPhone date back to late 2010, although they have intensified lately as the company approaches the rumored October release date for the “iPhone 5″.

You may recall last year’s loss of an iPhone 4 prototype, which was lost by an Apple employee and sold to Gawker Media’s Gizmodo. Steve Jobs eventually joked on the incident, but Apple did intervene in a legal action against Gizmodo and the “seller” of the device, saying that unreleased prototypes are “priceless” in regards of the kind of information that gets out to competitors ahead of time.

This year’s lost iPhone. however, hasn’t showed up on the Internet yet, and it may have been sold on Craigslist for around $200.

Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source.

When San Francisco police and Apple’s investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said.

Apple usually goes to great lengths in order to protect its iPhone prototypes, using special cases to make these devices look like older models, as with last year’s lost iPhone 4 that was actually found inside a 3GS-like case. It’s not clear whether this year’s (allegedly) lost iPhone is the same version that will end up in consumers’ hands later this year, or if it’s an iPhone 4 prototype running a faster chip that was apparently sent to developers for testing months ago. CNET’s report doesn’t specify whether Apple ever got the phone back, and Craigslist didn’t respond to a request for comments, either.

On Vietnamese forum Tinhte, a user has uploaded the above photo which he claims is a new “light” version of the iPhone 4 – potentially the rumored iPhone 4S that has been milling around in recent months. The photographs posted seem to show a nearly identical product to the iPhone 4, with the exception that there is no glass front and back panel. Instead the iPhone is plastered with a translucent plastic on either side with the familiar stainless steel banding around it.

According to information leakage, predictable from the English website, the more likely Apple will introduce the iPhone 4s (cheap version) and the iPhone 5 next month. And it looks like the iPhone that you see below is the iPhone 4s.

On the whole we’re fairly skeptical of this photo, except for the fact that in the past, Tinhte has been somewhat successful at leaking Apple prototypes, including this internal iOS 4 build and last year’s MacBook refresh. As for the possibility of a cheaper iPhone launching this year, not only has the rumor mill been churning out stories fairly frequently but Tim Cook conceded in this month’s earning call that Apple would be doing “clever things” to address the pre-paid mobile market and wouldn’t “cede any market”.

[Tinhte via TechCrunch]

As noted by MacRumors, a prototype “iTV” of the device that eventually shipped as the first-generation Apple TV is now available on eBay for a “Buy Now” price of $350. The device, resembling the original Apple TV with only an Apple logo on top but lacking the “TV” branding, is still functional and also managed to receive Apple TV software updates throughout the years, in spite of its internal and not-for-release nature that would suggest the device is not capable of running the latest software. However, the iTV is apparently working correctly and showing the 3.0 software update from 2007. The seller on eBay claims the pictures are the best description he can provide, and admittedly the device seems in good conditions.

The photos also show the device booted up and displaying the stock photo screensaver, although it is not connected to the Internet and the item’s description indicates that it has not been fully tested for functionality.

The iTV also has a couple of labels on its back, depicting the DVT (device verification test) status and the “Apple Development Team” that originally owned it and somehow gave it to someone else. Overall, the device looks like a genuine hardware verification unit that eventually shipped with a different logo, but still retains all the functionalities of the original Apple TV. Check it out here before it’s too late.

In the past few weeks, white iPhone prototypes and leaks have been popping up all over the place. Following a series of videos posted by a Vietnamese website showing a white iPhone 4 running an old iOS 4 build with different versions of multitasking and Spotlight, BGR managed to shoot some photos of another white iPhone running on T-Mobile USA network. Not to mention the fact that Apple is widely expected to finally introduce the white iPhone 4 tomorrow after a 10-month delay, although no official announcement has been made yet.

If you’re that kind of collector that doesn’t mind spending money to get your hands on Apple memorabilia, however, a white iPhone prototype is available on eBay. The prototype unit reports the usual XX Apple-internal marks on its case, runs iOS 4.3.1 (build 8G4) and it appears to be an AT&T iPhone. The unit has 16 GB of storage and it’s got DF3039 engraved on the front panel — perhaps an ID number for the unit. The eBay seller has posted several pictures of the device, and claims it’s “a mint condition Executive iPhone 4.” The price? This prototype is currently bidding at $2,838.00 and, as you can see from the photos, it comes with an old-style proximity sensor different from the one that will ship with the public version of the white iPhone. [via 9to5mac]

Occasionally minds more creative than mine combine technologies physical and virtual to create delightful products that make radio nerds like me ooze with excitement. If the fat grin on my face isn’t enough to show you just how much I enjoy this particular concept, then you must clearly be an American (at least we still have Rdio) or perhaps you can’t appreciate the simpler times when wood vinyl FM/AM radios played fuzzy music from our bedroom dressers. The concept — evolved through research and development from Jordi Parra — bonds RFID tags (which look kind of like poker chips) with a Spotify URL that when attached to the radio playback a playlist or radio station over WiFi. While the radio itself stores the information you assign from Spotify over USB, the RFID tags are nothing more than the “on switches” that relate to the stored playlists. These playlists are associated with colors, thus to play a particular sample of songs you’d simply attach a red RFID tag to the radio for example. The beauty of a concept like this is that it maintains the simplicity of a manual radio, while introducing and integrating with modern and intuitive technologies. The world may be going digital, but there’s still something about being able to touch music with your fingers that emotionally makes the analog experience so much more palatable and personal. Parra’s prototype doesn’t have a name, but the Spotify Box as it’s dubbed on Vimeo is a great reminder that good design doesn’t always have to have a touchscreen, or even an LCD display. It’s a return to the basics, and while I understand a student project such as this would take a considerable amount of effort to produce, I do wish Jordi and his team all the best if something like this gets off the ground. If you do start a Kickstarter, you’ve got my support.

Past the break we’ve embedded the concept video, and you can also check out the project in it’s entirety on Zenona. There’s a Flickr group if you want to see the project from draft to inception, but I have to say: having this much access to the workings of the prototype Spotify Box can drive an author to be a little too giddy, don’t you think?

[Zenona via TNW]

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The “XXGB” iPhone (which I joked was the 20 GB iPhone) that’s been rumored to be floating around in prototype fashion now has a hands on where a quick glimpse into the iPhone’s settings reveals its true capacity. M.I.C. Gadget compared the prototype to the original iPhone 4 model Gizmodo obtained, and came to the conclusion that these models had somehow found their way out of Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen. Catch the demo after the break.

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Take this with the proverbial grain of salt, but as noted by M.I.C. Gadget it appears that a series of iPhone 4s with capacity of 64 GB have been put on sale in grey markets of Hong Kong. The sellers are claiming these are “engineering prototypes” snatched directly from Apple in some way, running iOS 4.1 build 8B117 and carrying a lot of XXXs where the model numbers are ID should be.

According to Unwire.hk, this suspicious 64GB model has started selling in Sin Tak, the greatest grey market in Hong Kong, and the sellers claimed that these are engineered models and available in small quantity.

Do we believe this? Personally not so much, but I wouldn’t be surprised to know someone in mainland China managed to get a 64 GB prototype (which it’s very likely Apple has been testing for years) and put it on sale. What about the “small quantity” though? Did they really get multiple prototypes from a single source? Might as well be fake, considering how Apple could easily block and wipe these units remotely.

Still, a 64 GB iPhone would be great.

A few weeks ago, a Norway-based company called Elliptic Labs made the rounds of the Internet as they promised they would demo a touchless gesture technology for iPad at CES. The prototype is based on a docking station for the tablet, which has got an ultrasound system built-in that can pick frequencies out of the human range and, through a complex set of reflection calculations, determine the position of your hands in space in front of the device. This means you’ll be able to perform touch-based gestures such as swipe and scroll, without really touching anything.

The unit seen in the video is still a prototype, but it’s already been deployed in a Norwegian hospital where surgeons can control the iPad’s screen without touching it — clever implementation considering surgeons most likely have protective gloves on their hands. The system will also gain support for more gestures in the future, including multi-touch inspired ones. Right now, the demo shows how to flip through a photo gallery by just waving your hands, but the creator says it will be useful for say, changing music and control the iPad when driving. We bet it’s going to be interesting to see this in use in the kitchen, too.

In the video below, courtesy of the folks over at TUAW, you can see the prototype in action via a WiFi station and a custom iPad app. We think this is really cool, and we can’t wait to see version 2.0 of the prototype at CES next year. (more…)