The secret is out.

Those of you who have been wondering who in the world sold that lost

iphone

prototype to Gizmodo for the $5000 can now sleep easy because the guy who found the phone has been identified as Brian Hogan who is a 21 year old dude from Redwood City.

And there you have it, it’s come full circle.

Someone is definitely going to write a book about this lost

iPhone

, seriously, it has that much drama. Let’s run it down. Gizmodo leaked one of the most secretive products on earth early after they bought it from Hogan who found it in a bar after an Apple engineer got hammered on his birthday and forgot it on a bar stool

The blog then ripped the phone apart and posted it for the world to see, getting millions and millions of views.

Then, Apple got the police involved and theyraided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home. They even bashed down the door because he wasn’t home. Now, it’s being investigated and it has yet to be determined whether Chen is protected under the shield law in California, in other words, is he a journalist?

We have this guy Brian Hogan who was uncovered by Wired, and they report that he regrets not doing more to get the phone back to its proper owner, Apple:

Brian J. Hogan, a 21-year-old resident of Redwood City, California, says although he was paid by tech site Gizmodo, he believed the payment was for allowing the site exclusive access to review the phone. Gizmodo emphasized to him “that there was nothing wrong in sharing the phone with the tech press,” according to his attorney Jeffrey Bornstein.

Seriously, if that’s not a made for TV movie and a book deal right there, I don’t know what is. We now just have to see how it ends now. And if this is true:

A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.

It should be a pretty good one especially if it forces Apple to put the next iPhone on sale at WWDC as is rumored.

Credit:  Adam Mills from Examiner.com

Follow him on Twitter:  @admillios iphone

Posted in Information Technology, News