Case maker’s iPhone 6 renderings show thin design, rear antenna cutouts

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A new set of alleged ‘iPhone 6’ renderings surfaced online yesterday. The images come from Ukrainian website UkrainianiPhone, and the device depicted in them matches up with most everything we’ve seen thus far on the handset, including its relocated Sleep/Week button and circular iSight flash.

There is one noticeable difference, though, between this iPhone 6 model and the ones that we’ve seen in the past, and it has to do with the rear shell. Up until now, all of the renderings we’ve seen have shown a solid back cover. But these new shots suggest that Apple is leaving breaks for the antenna…

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If legitimate, these images indicate that the iPhone 6 may feature a similar backplate design to the iPhone 5s. Note how the chassis breaks at the top and bottom. It’s believed that these gaps could be for glass antenna windows, meaning the shell would not be solid metal as we had previously thought.

Obviously, there’s no way to verify the authenticity of these renderings, but UkrainianiPhone (via Nowhereelse.fr) says they were sent in by a trusted case manufacturer who is using them to produce iPhone 6 covers. And aside from the great teardrop fiasco of 2012, case-makers aren’t usually very far off.

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Additionally, the drawings show that the phone is just 6mm thin. That’s much thinner than the current iPhone 5s, which measures in at 7.6mm. It’s also 138mm long and 67mm wide, or roughly 5.4 x 2.6 inches, versus the iPhone 5s which is about 4.87 x 2.3 inches. So we’re not talking about a big difference here.

For those who haven’t been keeping up with the rumors, Apple is expected to unveil both a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 this September. The internals will be beefed up, of course, and the consensus is that it will look a lot like the device you see in these photos: sort of a cross between an iPad and an iPod touch.