I never minded the leaked design personally. I think it looks like an evolution of Apple designs and while I personally do not hate the side seams, it would look nicer without them. Maybe they will go with a solid ring of metal on the final shipping design. I still think it looks pretty nice overall.

I do think it was funny that when the pictures first came out on Engadget, people were overwhelmingly hating on it and declaring it a fake. Now that it has more or less been confirmed it is real, the vast majority of people say they love it, with a few still not liking it.

Not to belittle anyone’s individual opinion, it’s just that the groupthink is strong on this one.

Yes, SS, I am skeptical about the veracity of this phone being “lost”, too. The story just happened to come out just before the Incredible was announced, yet it was found in the bar over 2 weeks before.

What’s annoying about this design is that there will have to be yet another inset plate to go with all of the docking stations. At least they’ve stuck with that same 30-pin socket connector (for now).

I think the only chance of expansion beyond AT&T is the rumored Verizon offering in Sept., a couple of months after this 4th gen device goes out on AT&T. Now, the totally redesigned form factor would actually make sense if Apple were also designing a CDMA version of the phone’s guts. Perhaps that new shell can handle both implementations whereas the current one could not handle the CDMA design.

Then again maybe they just realized that they HAD to do something about that horrible battery, because the new one definitely has a bigger battery.

(though this doesn’t correct problems with the browser and its lack of cache, the extreme difficulty one encounters putting media on the device, the inordinately slow sync process, bad wifi connectivity (especially when switching to/from 3G), and absurd policies with the app store).