Rumors are still claiming that the next generation iPhone 5 will look and feel almost identical to the iPhone 4. At this point, we don’t even know what to believe anymore, so we’re going with “not believing any of them.”
According to the latest and greatest rumor, the next generation iPhone will include 512MB of DRAM, just like the iPhone 4, the same case, just like the iPhone 4, but a better antenna than the iPhone 4, if the news from Ming-Chi Kuo, originally published by AppleInsider, is to be believed.
It’s starting to sound like Apple’s about to re-release the iPhone 4, not the iPhone 5.
Here’s our attempt at making sense of this news
Apple has always kept the previous generation iPhone on the market, albeit at a slightly cheaper price-point. This rumor could be as simple as Ming-Chi restating the obvious: The iPhone 4 will still be around once the iPhone 5 ships.
Why would Apple wait this long past the traditional release schedule (late-spring) to bring a spec bump to market. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Since the beginning many have speculated that Apple would eventually move the iPhone release closer to the holiday season, and if the change in traditional release schedule is about doing just that, and only that, a lot of people will be very annoyed that they waited for the new release.
The longer the lack of the iPhone 5 release drags on, the less likely the release will be just hardware bump, right?
Put it this way. I’ve been using an iPhone 3G (please note the lack of S on the product name) since its release. My plan was to wait out my cellular contract until the first device after the iPhone 4 shipped. Traditionally that would have meant purchasing my next iPhone one full year after the release of the iPhone 4. We’re now heading into a year and a quarter territory now, and a new iPhone is nowhere in sight. If I’ve been suffering this long, holding out for the next-best iPhone, only to be awarded what amounts to an iPhone 4, I’m going to be pretty disappointed.
If you thought your iPhone 3GS was slow after the last iOS 4 update, try using the maps application with an iPhone 3G. It’s probably faster to navigate with ancient cartography tools than it is to load the application.
On the camera front
Over the weekend, while I was still hanging out in my hammock, a picture popped up online that was allegedly taken by an Apple Engineer using an “iPhone 4.” No big deal on the surface, but once the EXIF data was analyzed, it was revealed that the camera and its resolution was actually closer to an 8 megapixel camera than the 5 megapixels that is currently available on the iPhone 4. For the photo-inclined readers, the camera lens info was recorded at 4.3 mm f / 2.4, which is an upgrade over the iPhone 4’s current 3.85 mm f / 2.8 abilities.
The rumors, while interesting, are a little suspect. It’s hard to believe that an Apple engineer would leak a photo like this to the public if he was actually testing the camera, even though Apple seems to have an affinity for leaving prototype iPhones in bars.
The problem with this rumor? It’s not exactly difficult to edit the EFIX data on a photo, post-snap, these days. Heck, a quick Google search turned up an application called Reveal (requires Rosetta) that lets you do just that. Check out the image below.
As you can see, it took me all of 2 minutes to download the image and application, change most of the EXIF data, and republish it. According to our image, this photo was taken with a pretty crappy camera. Sure, the iPhone 5 may actually have an 8 megapixel camera attached to it, and sure, this photo could actually be legit, but the next time you read a rumor online take a moment and think to yourself, “How can I reproduce this is no time at all?” If the answer is a simple Google search away, we’d probably recommend that you take the rumor with a grain of salt.
Source: AppleInsider
