No, we don’t have the patience to wait till Monday. Nor does this Vodafone hired hand who decided to do some frisking of the 3G iPhone before the D-Day. Here’s what he discovered:

• The back is gloss black.
• The 4 models we have have a black skin wrapped around the back and glued into place. This is how they came from Apple.
• All are running v2.0 of the firmware.
• The bootloader hardware exploit is now fixed.
• The phone is running V 04.41.01 modem software.
• The phone is locked down like no phone has ever been. At this stage, you can’t jailbreak it and you can’t hardware unlock it.
• There is an added icon for contacts. This allows you to go straight to your contacts without having to hit the Phone icon first.
• The GPS works very well. It will attempt to obtain your position via WiFi first, cell tower second, then satellite third. The accuracy appears to be within 3 meters.
• We were getting a data transfer of 140kbps on average. It droped down to 70 kbps when we went inside.
• Apart from that, the “feel” is much the same. The phone is smaller (I would say 20 percent) and it is noticeable when you pick the unit up.

As with all things 3G iPhone, we will take this with a good-sized pinch of salt and wait till Monday, but that doesn’t stop us from bringing you more on the upcoming device, right?

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