Engadget has a cool story of why my white iPhone 4 is not coming, yet. Despite the “End of July” promise made by Apple, they did not further elaborate the reason why they can’t make it in time. But even as Apple keeps quiet, others do not. Chinese newspaper 21^st Century Business Herald has his own theory.

Lens Technology — a rather bland name for a touchscreen glass manufacturer — isn’t exactly a household name to the average gadget consumer, but its list of clients tells a different story: Huawei, Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and more. Since its launch in July 1993, the company’s set up several plants, including its latest site (circa December 2006) in Liuyang, Hunan that currently houses about 14,000 workers, which looks about right in the drawing above. While this is merely a fraction of Foxconn’s  400,000 employees in Shenzhen, Lens’ recent intake of some 7,000 “post-90′s” (a Chinese saying for those born after 1990) workers still led to many disciplinary issues. But this wasn’t the reason for the white iPhone 4 delay.

According to a project feasibility report published by Lens in 2006, its glass manufacturing process involves the following steps: developing the tooling, cutting the raw material (mainly sourced from Germany, Switzerland and Japan), fine-milling using CNC (computed numerically controlled) machines, sanding the edges, polishing, strengthening, cleaning, coating, screen printing, baking, anti-shatter treatment, assembling, and packaging. Yeah, pretty tedious. Now, a worker from Lens’ quality control department has allegedly admitted that the company’s screen-printing workshop may currently be dealing with some issues with the white iPhone 4 covers. Specifically, the factory’s still working out the perfect combination of paint thickness and opacity — the former to ensure the next sub-contractor has enough clearance for the digitizer overlay, and the latter for the absolute whiteness that Jony Ive and co. strive for. As we pointed out before, the prototype white covers we acquired appeared a touch darker than the iPhone 4 dock, so here’s hoping that we’ll see a better result when the official white phone comes out later this month.

[21_st Century BusinessHerald via Engadget]