Apple's 2005 iPhone prototype the size of an iPad

Lots of prototypes have been seen of Apple's iPhone, either in court documents produced in patent disputes, or in other leaked pictures.

But all those seen so far have been similar in size and shape to the finished product that made it to the market in 2007.

This latest picture, on the website Ars Technica, shows a roughly stuck together collection of components around seven inches long and five inches across.

The early prototype also has an Ethernet port and a USB port – features that we are more used to seeing on laptops than something that was to become a smartphone.

But as the source of the leak - a former Apple employee - told Ars Technica, "at that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be”.

"Seems large now," the source said, "but at the time it was really impressive seeing basically a version of OS X running on it."

He continued: "From the looks of the logic board photos, Apple had a decent idea in 2005 of where the iPhone would end up, even if the final product became much more integrated.

The ARM chip looks like a variant of the Samsung S3C2410, according to which Ars Technica writer Andrew Cunningham, who said it is "a distant relative of the chip the first iPhone ended up using, just older and slower."

He added: "This chip is also an ARM9 chip, while the original iPhone eventually ended up using an ARM11 chip, but obviously Apple intended to use Samsung-manufactured ARM chips even this far back.”.