A pretty smile, a beautiful mistake, thanks to iPhone

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Beijing, Aug 27 : When she flashed an angel-like smile to her colleague testing an iPhone camera on a Chinese production line, the cute worker never thought her action would trigger a global hunt for her.

The iPhone-girl frenzy began last week when her photographs appeared on MacRumors.com, a popular forum of Apple product fans.

This has forced Foxconn, a Taiwan-funded company that makes iPhones for Apple in China to reassure that it will not punish its staff members for the “beautiful mistake.”

Markm49uk, a British netizen who posted the photographs, said he found the mystery girl smiling at him from the screen when he unpacked his new 3G iPhone. He found two more of her photographs in the photo album.

The girl’s beautiful face has become a permanent fixture on the new iPhone because one of her colleagues apparently forgot to delete it from the memory of the master copy, China Daily reported.

Then began netizens’ search for her, making her instantly popular and prompting even the global media to report the incident.

Many people expressed fear that the girl, a native of Hunan province in central China, could be penalised by her employers for posing for the home screen.

However, her employers, Foxconn, that makes iPhones for Apple in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, has given an assurance that she or her supervisor would not be penalised, the report said.

In fact, Foxconn has described the incident as a beautiful mistake . “She is an assembly worker in the mobile ph testing department and she is still working there. But she has requested us not to make her name public and we will respect her decision,” Liu Kun, Foxconn Technology Group spokesman, said.

Her photograph appeared on the iPhone screen because of “a small mistake during our working process but the outcome has not been negative”. On the contrary, “her lovely face has become popular on the Internet and we would rather call it a beautiful mistake”, Liu said. Every iPhone’s built-in camera will be tested from now on, and any such photographs deleted, Liu said.