The Next iPhone, (Apparently) Revealed

By  |  Monday, April 19, 2010 at 10:56 am

Over the weekend, Engadget published three photos of what what it said would seem to be the next generation iPhone–along with a weird tale of the phone being found hidden inside an iPhone 3G case on the floor of a bar in San Jose. Now Gizmodo has a long post based on extensive hands-on time with the same phone–although they say it’s up highway 101 in Redwood City. Giz has photographed it, and shot video of it, and dismantled it. And while we don’t know for sure whether this is precisely the phone that Apple will presumably release sometime in the next few months, it seems unimaginable that it’s a hoax or a Chinese clone or any of the other things the phone might be other than a real Apple prototype.

Gizmodo says that the phone is stuck at the “Connect to iTunes” screen–maybe because Apple disabled it remotely–but here’s what we know:

  • It has a better, higher-resolution screen
  • It has a front-facing camera
  • It has a bigger rear camera, with flash
  • It has an all-new industrial design–thinner and more angular, made from a new material that could be ceramic, glass, or plastic–more in tune with the iPad than the iPhone 3GS
  • The volume buttons are discrete (Giz theorizes it’s so one can double as a camera button)
  • Like the iPad, it uses a new, smaller MicroSIM card
  • It has a big battery and weighs more than the 3GS

All of this is plausible, and much of it is consistent with earlier rumors from reliable sources. It adds up to what would seem to be a major upgrade–especially with iPhone OS 4 onboard. Even though Giz doesn’t say anything about key specs such as the CPU, RAM, and flash storage.

Accurate rumors about upcoming Apple products filter out. Spy shots sometimes leak. I can’t, however, remember another instance of a major product landing in the hands of a media outlet weeks before Apple was ready to talk about it. The handset is surely Apple’s property–I wonder if it’ll attempt to get it back, and what the repercussions will be for whoever was supposed to be taking care of it?

 
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6 Comments For This Post

  1. Mike Cerm Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 11:44 am

    Steve Jobs is surely going to “disappear” the person who lost this phone. However, even though it’s now public, we’re not really learning much new information about it. Other than being surprisingly ugly, it’s basically exactly what everyone expected Apple to be working on, feature-wise.

    The only thing that we don’t know will be the actual screen-resolution. Presumably, they’re keeping the 3:2 aspect ratio that all previous-gen iPhones have (Gizmodo probably would have noticed if the screen were a different shape). None of the current high-end Android phones use that ratio (they’re all 800×480, or closer to 16:9). What would make the most sense is for Apple to go 960×640, enabling compatibility with older models through simple pixel-doubling, instead of more complicated math. However, I’ve never seen a screen with that resolution before, so who knows what they’ll actually do.

    Spoiler Alert: The “specs” (like CPU, RAM, and storage options), will be EXACTLY the same as the iPad. The only difference would be the GPU, because the iPhone doesn’t need to push quite as many pixels.

  2. Brandon Backlin Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 12:24 pm

    What would be cool is them keeping the GPU from the iPad. Can you imagine how silky-smooth 3D games would run at a lower resolution?

  3. Mike Cerm Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 1:44 pm

    It wouldn’t surprise me to see them keep the same GPU as the iPad; it might just be cheaper and simpler to have a unified-architecture across the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPod Touch lines. However, if something must be cut due to size, power, or cost constraints, better the GPU than anything else.

  4. Bouke Timbermont Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    engadget reported this model has 80GB of flsh storage… sure would be nice 🙂

    about the screen: 960×640 is the ONLY upscale (well, not only: 1440×960 would work too… but lets keep it realalistic :p) apple could pull of without messing up every single iPhone-app. And since the Appstore is in fact the only thing setting the iPhone so far ahead of the competition, a 960×640 upscale seems very probable to me.

  5. Hamranhansenhansen Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 6:00 pm

    > Like the iPad, it uses a new, smaller MicroSIM card

    I knew this would be the case.

    The article on Wired that put forth some kind of conspiracy theory where the micro-SIM on the iPad was solely to keep you from putting your iPhone SIM in an iPad (as if you would want to put an $80/month SIM in a $15/month device) really bothered me. So stupid. It’s obvious that once Apple ships a micro-SIM they’re done with big SIM’s. They’ve been obsessively making things smaller for a decade now.

    > 960Ă—640

    I thought they already confirmed that is the resolution?

    > ceramic

    The back is apparently ceramic, so it’s radio transparent.

  6. Mike Cerm Says:
    April 19th, 2010 at 7:15 pm

    I haven’t seen the resolution confirmed anywhere, I was just making a prediction. Also, Apple has been obsessively making things smaller? If that’s true, why are the new Nanos larger than the old ones, and how come they don’t make any laptops smaller than 13″?

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