Well now it appears that a purported image of Apple’s next generation iPhone was shown in a Twitter post the other day by some French guy called @Rob1P, with the wording with the image in French naturally, but is that sender looking iPhone 5 image real?

Well according to Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo the answer to that question is no it’s not real and just to show how easy it is for someone to fake an image of the iPhone 5 he made one of his own which he calls the “iPhone 5 Slim,” which you can see below.

Diaz says it is very easy to fake an image using Photoshop and the image of the iPhone 5 Slim only took him 10 minutes to come up with and one does have to say Diaz’s image does look as if it could have been the real deal iPhone 5 sitting next to the iPhone 4, but obviously at Diaz’s own admission the image is a fake.

The reason for his fake iPhone 5 Slim picture is to show just how easy it is to fake images of upcoming products and thus basically no one should believe what their eyes see as more often than not the image will turn out to be a dud.

The original tweeted image French text when translated apparently says, “A picture like this could drive some sites crazy,” something that should point to the photo as being a dud in the first place, as obviously the poster was looking for some kind of net glory, albeit short lived.

Having said that, obviously albeit Diaz making his own fake iPhone 5 picture, it doesn’t actually prove that the original French image is an out and out fake, but it sure does make one wonder, which I guess was the whole point of Diaz’s article in the first place, and just goes to show what can be done with a little skill and time in Photoshop.

So I figure the moral of this is, don’t believe what your eyes tell you when it comes to images on the Internet, and only believe when something is accompanied by an official conformation, especially when it comes to Apple gear.