Vodafone iPhone 5 Nano SIMs Prematurely Pictured (But Was It On Purpose?)

Vodafone UK has readied 500,000 nano SIM cards suited for Apple's iPhone 5, with the carrier briefly spilling the SIM stockpile stat in a post on its official blog. That post – since yanked (though Google's cached version reveals all) – claimed that "the first devices have now been announced" that use the new nano SIM size, though of course that's not actually the case; in fact, the first such phone is all but certain to be Apple's new iPhone, and that gets its official reveal tomorrow.

"Vodafone has now got 500,000 of the new 12.3 mm x 8.8 mm nano-SIMs in stock" the carrier pre-emptively crowed. "Stripped of all excess plastic, this fourth generation SIM card is 40 percent smaller than a micro-SIM, but supports the conventional eight electrical contacts and fits backwards into current micro-SIM slots so that you can use it during any changeover period."

The photos, meanwhile, show the nano SIM still fixed inside the credit-card sized shipping plastic, as well as in size-comparisons with today's micro SIMs as in the current iPhone 4S and other devices. For those not in the UK, the two coins are British 20 pence and 5 pence pieces.

It's potentially a case of premature publishing and, with no specific mention of the iPhone 5, it's unlikely to get Vodafone into any trouble with Apple. The conspiracy theorists among us might wonder, however, whether Vodafone revealed the SIMs early on purpose, to distract from new UK LTE carrier EE's hint at ranging the new iPhone earlier today.

[via Pocket-lint]