It looks like the plastic iPhone touted as the iPhone 5C is all but confirmed. China Labor Watch has been looking into one of Apple’s supplier, Pegatron, to check on the working condition of the workers, and they found something a little more – information about the plastic iPhone. One of the undercover investigator’s diary entries wrote:
Today’s work is to paste protective film on the iPhone’s plastic back cover to prevent it from being scratched on assembly lines. This iPhone model with a plastic cover will soon be released on the market by Apple.
The task is pretty easy, and I was able to work independently after a five-minute instruction from a veteran employee. It took around a minute to paste protective film on one rear cover. The new cell phone has not yet been put into mass production, so quantity is not as important. This makes our job more slow-paced than in departments that have begun mass production schedules.
Of course, we can’t be certain about the low cost iPhone until we see it in real, but with the recent leak of the iPhone 5C casings, we can be a little bit more certain that a budget iPhone is on its way to the market.
That being said, it looks like the Pegatron factories are in some pretty deep waters as well, China Labor Watch recently reported that the labor conditions in Pegatron are even worse than Foxconn factories, which lead to this finding. The workers are expected to work long hours, have their salary withheld and have been working in an environment with safety concerns for the past couple of months. CLW’s undercover investigator revealed at least 86 labor rights violations.
Finally in the latest Apple news, if your iPhone or iPad is running on iOS 7, do check for an update to beta 4 that comes with a host of bug fixes and improvements. In the change log of the latest beta version of the newmobile operating system from Apple, it has been discovered that there will be a fingerprint scanner on a new Apple product. A folder called “BiometricKitUI” was discovered by a developer, Hamza Sood. The code in the folder describes the set-up process for a fingerprint scanner embedded in the iPhone Home button. The new hardware and feature will come with an image tutorial that shows how it works:
Low-cost plastic iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5S that comes with a spanking new hardware from Apple, what are your thoughts about Apple’s latest projects?
(Gizmodo, TheVerge 1, TheVerge 2, PhoneArena)
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