This iPhone 4 celebration takes the cake

The arrival of the iPhone 4 in 2010 gave smartphone users plenty of reason to celebrate this past year. So why not mark the end of 2010 and the beginning of a new year with one last tribute to Apple’s phone—this time in cake form?

That appears to be the thinking of Krishna Kalyan, at any rate. The Hyderabad, India resident decided to ring in the new year with a made-to-order cake designed to resemble an iPhone 4. Here’s a photo taken just before the iPhone cake was subjected to an iFixit-style teardown.

From the photo of the iPhone cake—shot with an iPhone, for that extra delicious touch of meta—you can see that the cake is adorned with icons of Krishna’s favorite apps. In addition to some of the built-in Apple offerings (Photos, Camera, Settings, iTunes, Weather, Messages, and of course the phone, iPod, Safari, and mail applications), the icons for iBooks, DailyBurn, NewsRack, AwesomeNote, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, GoTasks, Moneycontrol’s Markets on Mobile and Momento have all been preserved in frosted immortality. (In a particularly nice touch, some of the app icons even have their own badges.) No offense to Steve Jobs and his 2000 description of Mac OS X’s Aqua interface, but these iPhone cake icons seem like the more lickable ones.

Downsides to the iPhone 4 cake include an inability to conduct FaceTime chats and a rather gooey multitouch interface. On the bright side, though, battery life is off the charts, and you don’t have to sign a contract.

We’re expecting tech industry pundits to weigh in soon enough on how Android-based desserts will soon eat up the iPhone cake’s market share—assuming Krishna and friends don’t wind up devouring it first.