some thoughts:
multiple dummy models were distributed to apple internal staff prior to the release of the first one, very few people knew what it was actually going to look like. this photo looks real to me, but it may not be the final model for our 3g iphone. (it may even be one of the v1 iphones that didn't make the cut)
if you're making test models, are you really going to shell out for unnecessary internals? storage capacity has no impact whatsoever on the performance of the device while testing it, what's the point in making 32gb ones if the product may not even be released? i doubt apple would spend on extra storage until it was completely happy with the final release 2nd gen model - which this may not be. look at how much the 64gb flash drive for the macbook air costs - why waste this sort of money on dev costs when you don't have to?
the iphone was originally released in 4gb and 8gb models. the nano is still available in 4gb. why is 8gb not enough storage in a phone? up til the iphone, the most you could put in any phone, that i know of, was 2gb, with flash cards, that you have to shell out for after buying the phone (and they're not cheap). even after the iphone was released, i'm only aware of two phones that offer 8gb of storage other than the iphone. 8gb is enough for 1 or 2 feature films and a decent amount of music. don't forget that the phone also has really good (read: useable) internet access (which will realistically become reliably high-speed when it's finally made 3g), meaning that a lot of the content you might be interested in either
-wasn't available on your phone before (or was hard to get on your phone before)
-is be available online
meaning that you don't have to load it onto the thing, because you can get it whenever you need it.
add to that the app store coming in june - 8gb is still plenty, and it's the bottom end.
this has been said somewhere else in this thread too, but if you're a dev working on an unreleased product, having signed who knows how many non disclosure agreements, and you want to leak information about it, you aren't going to hang around and get the perfect camera angle and take 50 shots using a dslr, retouch them in photoshop/aperture, and post them onto your personal blog. not unless you have a death wish. in this instance, you may only have 3 seconds while your fellow workers have stepped out to grab a drink/smoke, and you aren't going to take a whole lot of photos, because deleting a photo, even from an iphone, takes time. if you have to delete 2, it takes twice as long. 3, 3 times as long etc. if confronted, you need to be able to can the evidence so quickly that it just looks like you're doing something really mundane - the sort of time it takes your boss to say "what's that you're doing there?" so you'll probably be using a camera embedded in another device, such as a phone, which probably won't be that high quality. most phone cameras are about 2 megapixels and are grainy as whitehaven beach. this photo looks like the real deal.
whether the model shown is the real deal remains to be seen, and based on what we've got, i don't think there's enough evidence to definitively say either way until we get more shots or the product is actually released.
but we'll know soon enough =)
