Kevin Rose, founder of social networking hub Digg caused a major stir in the technological world by broadcasting revelations about the new iPhone in December. Except that now it turns out he was completely wrong. 

“Small as sh*t”, he said. Er, large as hell? Specifically he said it would be smaller than the iPod Nano, which is interesting given that you could actually fit three Nanos inside the iPhone! iPod Mega?

Here are the dimensions:

iPhone: Height – 115mm, Width – 61mm, Thickness – 11.6mm. Total Cubic Area – 81,374mm

iPod Nano: Height – 90mm, Width – 40mm, Thickness – 6.9mm. Total Cubic Area – 24,840mm.

So the iPhone is in fact more than 200% bigger than the Nano!

In fact if you put a Nano back to back with a Samsung P300, the iPhone would still be bigger!

Look at it here side by side (via painstakingly designed cardboard cut out!) with various other contraptions and you’ll see just how big it is. It dwarfs the Video iPod which packs quite a considerable girth as it is!

Is this a bad thing? Well, not necessarily. We seem to be growing out of the obsession with tiny phones and lots of the more recent releases are creeping up in size again. I personally don’t mind a big phone, and it does at least mean a decent screen size.

What else was Kevin Rose was wrong about? Pretty much everything…

Slide out keypad - Nope, its an entirely touch screen display.

Two batteries – Doesn’t look like it. The description on Apple’s website says only one battery.

Price $249 and $449: Actually $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB.

So it this going to be as revolutionary as Apple tell us it is?

Its unlikely to be a flop as some people are predicting, because of the sheer weight of the iPod brand, but to call it “literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone“, as Steve Jobs did, might be stretching it a bit far! In what way is it five years ahead? The two mega-pixel camera? The lack of 3G? The screen display that’s not quite as good as other internet devices? Its not a smartphone so you can’t install any more software onto it and it doesn’t even look like you can download over the air from iTunes. True, the touch screen display does look cool and it is a great looking phone, but that’s hardly grounds for a revolution!

It must be the most eagerly awaited phone in history though, so it’ll be fascinating to see the reaction to it. It’s set to be released in the US in June so we’re probably talking late 2007 for the UK.