There have been noises leaking out of the iPhone user base indicating that things aren’t as slick as we may initially have been led to believe. By now we’re all well used to the insinuation that the iPhone is a hot product, but it turns out it’s hot enough to do some (aesthetic) damage to the device.

Looking good, but not for long, sadly.

The issue so far only effects the white iPhone 3G S, leaving them with a darkened discolouration on their backs. So far, black iPhones seem unaffected, which is all well and good until you take into consideration the fact that overheating of any kind probably isn’t doing the device very much good.

Wired is reporting that this kind of overheating issue is limited to a relatively small number of the morass of iPhone 3G S devices in the wild so far, but it’s still a cause for some concern. If you consider the fact that Apple has managed to get more than a million of the new devices into circulation then this is the kind of problem that could cause serious headaches in the future if it turns out to be more widespread than it looks.

This would all be fine if not for the fact that it’s now starting to seem quite likely that this flaw (believed to be in the battery cells powering the iPhone 3G S) could effect a large portion of the 3G S devices already in the wild. As Rapid Repair’s, Aaron Vronco put it, “My guess is there’s going to be a whole lot of batteries affected because these are from very large production runs. If you have a problem in the design of a series of batteries, it’s probably going to be spread to tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and maybe more.”

So far, Apple hasn’t commented on the whole affair, but you can bet that Apple’s customers aren’t the kind of people who’ll take the gradual self-defacing of their oh-so-pretty new iPhone lying down. When you trade on the good looks of your product it’s never going to win you any friends when those products tarnish themselves.

You can read about the whole kafuffle in more detail with some history of Apple’s previous battery-overheating woes in Wired, here.