iPhone 5

I'm sure there are plenty of people out there, fans and foes alike of Apple Computer, that are anxious to see what the next generation of the company's popular smartphone looks like. Now, those of us without work as executives at said company remain in the dark, but there's a lot of speculation going on. This Google search for "iPhone 5" will yield a staggering number of sites dedicated to the coming device. I personally get most of my news the official way, through CNET.com (haha). This article by Lance Whitney predicts either a late September or October launch. For those of you that don't know, the majority of speculation about the iPhone 5 relates to iPhone 4S rumors, essentially stating that the next generation will be an upgrade to the platform similar to the 3G to 3GS change, giving the phone a higher-spec camera, a higher-res screen, increased iOS5 capabilities, and near field communications (see this article).

Personally, though, I have a feeling that Apple may have something a bit trickier up its sleeve. Remember when the iPhone 4 came out? Looking at this chart you'll notice that the iPhone 4 was released to almost exactly a year after the iPhone 3GS, yet was a pretty major redesign. Now, it's currently mid-August, an entire month after June, and no iPhone 5 yet. What gives? Early in the yeara report by CNET Blogger, Lance Whitney revealed that an A5 chip was likely to be included, with few other details. Now why do I believe that it will truly be the iPhone 5? Because Apple has spent more than a year developing this thing, they even pushed the release back by three months, and obviously put a lot of work into iOS5, iCloud, and iTunes 10.3+ (iTunes in the Cloud), so why wouldn't they also take that time to develop a bigger (screen), better, faster iPhone? Knowing Apple, they'll want to market the phone as "Changing it all. Again. Again." (though hopefully with less cheese, the market is lactose intolerant). So my guess is that the iPhone 5 will come shipped with a more traditional beveled back, an 8MP rear-facing camera, the A5 integrated processing chip, the standard 512MB of RAM (same as iPhone 4), 8MB flash memory (since iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud make music more easily accessible), a larger screen (pushing back the bezel above and below), and of course an NFC chip. As for appearance, I think the new iPhone is really going to start looking like the "iPad Mini" some people call it (mocking the iPad), making the case once-again ergonomic.

That's pretty much all I've got to say about the iPhone 5, we'll just have to wait to see what it actually looks like, I guess!

PS: I had a really nifty idea for a phone, where a portion of the bezel was pushed even further back, so that next to the front-facing camera could be fitted some sort of smaller display, possibly E Ink to give the user battery, signal, GPS, time, date, et al. The display would be small and low-power-consuming (such as E Ink), to display the different stuff even when the main screen is off. Maybe even a larger variation that displays incoming call info? Anyway, I think it would be cool to have a tiny status E Ink display, especially because it would only take up power whenever you signal strength dramatically changed, every minute (for time changes) or when your battery dropped to the next level of remaining energy, and even then would take very little power. That's all for today, for those of you going back to school in the coming weeks, I feel your pain and wish you well, au revoir!