Sure, nobody likes their unfinished product being submitted to the general public before the final vision is realized. The music and movie industry know this to be all too true with songs and cutting room floor footage being plastered onto the Internet on the daily. And pirated software can be streamlined to meet real time standards.

But lost hardware? That’s an entire set of unprecedented problems no company should have to face. But in an extreme case of somebody-done-effed-up, it seems a suit at Apple left a working prototype of the new iPhone after having one too many Amaretto Sours at a bar in Redwood City, California. (Which is just 20 miles away from Apple’s headquarters if you want to play to detective.)

If you find the new Eminem CD, you send it to TSS. If you stumble onto the new iPhone, you shoot it to Gizmodo. Disguised as the old iPhone 3GS, the Gizmodo team spent about a week of extensive testing to rule out possibilities of it being a “fake.” Now, the leaked documentation is all over the web. Through their conclusive studies, the tech team found the following discoveries:

What’s New

• Front-facing video chat camera

• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)

• Camera flash

• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)

• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.

• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack

• Split buttons for volume

• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s Changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound

• An aluminum border going completely around the outside

• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)

• Everything is more squared off

• 3 grams heavier

• 16% Larger battery

• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

This type of EPIC FAIL would make any CEO shave a couple years off their life and since Steve Jobs has a considerable bit of health problems, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear he was on an island somewhere, clutching his chest, crying out to Elizabeth.

This Is Apple’s Next iPhone [Gizmodo]