The Apple rumor mill starts in earnest. iPhone rumors abound!
Ahh It’s that time of year again. The summer months are upon us once again. The weather grows warm, beaches are opening, love is in the air, the blogosphere is happily twittering, and it’s time for his holy Steveness to come out on stage and restore a child-like sense of wonder to our lives.
That’s right, Apple’s WWDC conference, and it’s coveted Stevenote is just a few short days away. On June 9th the press will descend upon the Moscone Center for what will of course be a hotly speculated-upon event. As per usual the rumor mill has already started going and speculation is running rampant for what we might see.
So, I figure, why not throw my hat in the rampant-speculation ring?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: The an updated iPhone is coming. That much is pretty obvious at this point. We’ve seen mockups, and accessory templates, and alleged “leaked” photos left and right. So, what’s new about it?
Well the most widely confirmed fact is that it is indeed 3g. That’s right, expect the new iPhone to have some seriously sexy, battery-killing, super-fast data service. That is, if your AT&T area supports it. This is one of those things that was an obvious omission from the original iteration of the iPhone, though I can figure out why. 3g is a serious battery killer. You think your iPhone with wifi on is bad? Wait till you see this! Apple left it out of the original phone to see if it was really necessary. If the EDGE data was okay, they wouldn’t have to worry about critics crying that the phone had terrible battery life. Now that we’ve collectively demanded it, Apple is giving it to us knowing all well that we can’t complain if it kills our battery life. We’ve brought it upon ourselves. Of course I have a feeling you’ll be able to shut it off when you don’t want to use it and go back to the slower, but battery conserving EDGE connection.
Another recent but widely reported rumored feature is GPS. Now this would be interesting. With a real GPS solution built into the phone, Apple could absolutely take a big chunk out of the third-party auto GPS market. The iPhone has a big beautiful touch screen and an external speaker. Put some beautiful Google built GPS mapping software with a 3d turn by turn view like other GPS devices, have a holster that you can suction to your windshield, and you have a device that makes even the sexiest Garmin Nuvi look kind of lame in comparison.
Having a GPS module would also allow for a lot of really interesting location aware pieces of software. Imagine if you will, a location-enabled Flickr application for this new iPhone. You could be touring a monument or museum, and Flickr would automatically pull up any other highly rated photos taken from your location. It would give you an opportunity to see places from a different point of view.
You could also have a location aware social network like Brightkite, letting you know where your friends are at the time and what they’re doing. Imagine if you will that your friends went to a bar that you weren’t familiar with. One of your friends sends you an invite over the network, which is texted to your phone. The service knows both where you and your friends are, and automatically allows you to RSVP and puts together turn by turn directions for you. It also opens avenues for location based shopping tools. You could take a photo of a barcode of an item at a store, which will be identified as a certain SKU. A search of the SKU is done and you will be given the stores in your area that might have a better price.
Going even more advanced, Imagine that there are 15,000 people in your area with GPS enabled iPhones. Many of them will probably be driving. Now if all of these iPhones report their location to a traffic service, you could see real-time data on which roads are moving more slowly than others and the Mapping service could route you to the fastest road in real-time.
These are just a few things that came to my mind when thinking about the possible GPS on an iPhone, and I’m sure there are even cooler things that people could do with it. Needless to say that this could VERY possibly become a killer-app for the iPhone.
Another rumored feature is a possible front-facing camera for videoconferencing. Phones with this feature are already popular with European and Asian cellphone users, but it has yet to break into the American market. But the concept of it is just too cool to pass up. iChat AV on the iPhone would really be the Jetsons’ come to life. Would I use it? Not much, but it’s still neat.
What else will it do? Make my breakfast? Do my laundry? Unlikely. But look for it to be slightly thicker with a slightly curved back to hide the thickness. Why? Bigger battery? Chipset takes up more space? Who knows, but that’s what we’ve all heard.
Also, obviously expect the release of iPhone version 2 software with third party app and exchange support, along with a slew of really neat Apple built apps to go along with it. Price will probably be the same, but AT&T might have a subsidy scheme in the pipeline. Availability? Either that day or VERY shortly thereafter. They want to make this a HUGE launch to get to that 10,000,000 unit goal.
So getting the iPhone out of the way. What else is in store for us?
This is where it gets tricky. There are a lot of strange rumors running about tablets and iphone nanos, and new macbooks, and macbook pros. So what do I think?
Well to me it seems pretty likely that at the VERY least we’ll be seeing a MacBook Pro redesign, but probably also the standard MacBook as well. They haven’t done a significant redesign of the Pro laptop line since the PowerPC days and it’s getting long in the tooth. I would expect the MacBook and MacBook Pro to follow design cues from both the current iMac and the MacBook Air. All having the scrabble tile style keyboards, probably black and backlit across the line. Expect aluminum bodies, and glossy LED screens. Perhaps an iMac style black to the edge screen bezel. All in all, expect to possibly see some new laptops.
Which brings me to the most interesting of the possible releases, the one I think is kind of far fetched. An Apple Tablet computer. Now, don’t get me wrong. they’re working on one for sure. I am a firm believer that the entire line of Apple devices is going to go the way of the iPhone at some point, but somehow I just don’t see this year’s WWDC as being the place to release such a device.
What I think is more likely is an announcement and first look on MacOS 10.6. I fully expect 10.6 to be fully multi-touch capable, and sporting a UI that is more finger friendly. Expect them to do some demos showing off multi-touch iPhoto and Google Earth and it will be all good. get the developers involved in writing really great, really rich multi-touch apps for the Mac, and then they will take care of the hardware end of the spectrum sometime towards the end of the year. Apple is not known for showing off prototype hardware though, and this is where I can’t figure out how they’re going to manage this.
If they do release a device this year, expect it to me much more like a larger iPhone than a Mac, but possibly with more desktop quality apps like iPhoto and Pages for use on the bigger (lets say 9″ for good measure?) touchscreen. This would make sense as long as the SDK will allow these touch apps to run on full OS 10.6 when that is released. It will be interesting to see how Apple makes this transition.
Though like anything else they do, you could even expect they’d throw the baby out with the bathwater, announce OS 11 and the end of the physical mouse and keyboard across the whole line. You just never know. And that is why, we as bloggers and journalists love to speculate. The press train is leaving the station, time to get on board! See you at Moscone!
Tags: 3g, Apple, AT&T, BrightKite, EDGE, Flickr, Garmin Nuvi, GPS, iPhone, Macbook, Macbook Pro, OS 10.6, Tablet