iPhone snapshot: Harbinger or mirage?

OMG, an iPhone photo!

Apple fanatics who can't wait for the got a little treat to tease them over the weekend: a photo allegedly taken with an iPhone popped up on Flickr.

The photo has since been taken down, but the data included with the images suggests it was taken with one of the as yet unreleased devices, and the specs seem to match with what Apple has promised for the iPhone. The photographer is apparently an Apple employee, but many bloggers noted that the EXIF data posted on Flickr can be easily edited.

Whether the image was real, it was enough to get Apple fans gossiping.

Blog community response:

"What's nice is that the photo (of the hair man, not the kitty) seems to have relatively low grain in fair indoor lighting. This second shot, taken against a window, looks bad, in the grain department, but it's got fair shadow detail for something taken against ham-filtered sunlight. Looks like the iPhone's camera will work fairly well. (If this is indeed the real deal.)"
--Gizmodo

"So, the Apple iPhone does appear to encode orientation information (landscape or portrait) into photos based on whether or not the phone is held vertically or horizontally."
--MacRumors.com

"Clever prank or unfortunate mistake? If it truly is a mistake, I don't see it as being a leak, rather a smaller teaser of things to come. After all, we don't know more than we already did, do we?"
--MacUser