An Apple engineer left the company's unreleased fourth-generation iPhone at a bar after drinking a German beer in Redwood city, California, technology weblog Gizmodo reported Monday.

The report claimed that the Apple employee, who worked on the iPhone baseband software, was at Gourmet Haus Staudt last Thursday evening, just 20 miles from the company's Cupertino, Calif., campus.

The guy allegedly left the bar without the prototype iPhone, which was then found by a patron sitting next to him.

According to the report, the person who found the device asked people around but no one claimed it. So he took it home without realizing it is the unreleased version of iPhone.

The anonymous finder noticed that by the next morning the phone had been remotely deactivated through MobileMe and it had a forward facing camera on the front. He felt something was not right and then managed to remove the exterior casing to reveal the true outer shell of the fourth-generation iPhone prototype.

After buying the phone for 5,000 dollars from the finder and examined it carefully, Gizmodo managed to contact with the engineer who allegedly lost the iPhone on Monday and said they would like to give it back.

The person reportedly said they couldn't "talk too much," but indirectly confirmed the iPhone was theirs.

From the front, the phone looks similar to the current iPhone, but it has sharper edges and is a little thinner. The volume and power buttons are stylistically different, and the back of the phone appears to be a ceramic glass, which would enable better reception.