Lost iPhone 5? There’s Video Surveillance of That

Tweet

This year’s lost iPhone case is nowhere near as interesting as the one we saw last year, but it looks like SFPD is very much interested in what really happened with that particular device. At the same time there still are no requests from Apple for a formal investigation of the lost device, police officials say.

The phone has been forgotten in a bar, Cava 22, and since it happened, Apple, escorted by police officers, went on to search for the device after locating it in or near a home in Bernal Heights. After performing the search the handset was not found, and it is not exactly clear how and why Apple employees were allowed to search the home, car and computer of Sergio Calderon.

What’s also interesting is that Apple has not filed a formal complaint with the SFPD, therefore the police isn’t looking for the lost device or for the person that got it. “In order for there to be a crime, you need a victim,” Lt. Troy Dangerfield told CNET reporters.

But the SFPD is still conducting an internal investigation to assess the way police assisted Apple in the search of Calderon’s property. For that they apparently need footage from the surveillance cameras present in Cava 22.

Jose Valle, the owner of the bar, has such recordings and he is willing to show them to the police. Apparently there are six cameras in the bar, but they’re not recording live video. Instead they’re snapping pictures every 3 minutes, which in turn get saved on a hard drive. That can certainly be a problem when looking for an unknown device lost by an unknown Apple employee and allegedly retrieved by a third person.

What will the police find? That’s a tough question to answer, and considering that Apple is rumored to announce the iPhone 4S/5 in just over a week, a lost iPhone 5 prototype seems to be less and less interesting. Maybe the device has been safely returned to Apple since more than two months have passed from the moment the handset has been reported to be lost. What’s clear though is that no tech blog has gotten their hands on images of the device. Or better said, while we’ve seen plenty of new iPhone parts get leaked lately, nobody admitted to have entered into possession of a prototype of the much-anticipated device that would have been found in a bar in July.

Are you buying a new iPhone this year?