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Next iPhone — Front-Facing Camera, A4 Processor
As a quarter million pre-orderers wait for their iPad on Saturday, the millions of iPhone users can start speculating in earnest about the next gen iPhone. The rumors start by saying "It will be dubbed the 'iPhone HD' and will include a double resolution display, a front facing camera, multitasking support, and the blazing A4 processor."
...because ?
For the iPhone 3GAss.
Sig this!
.... how Apple always manages to thrive upon rumors instead of upon "classical" ads. You may call such rumors "hypes", and they prolly are. Still, they do constitute remarkable publicity feats.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And this is different from the 10000 other rumors...because ?
Cause it's rumors that are occurring less than a week before the iPad - DUH!
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Don't worry, the other 10000 rumors will all get their own Slashdot articles too.
Is Apple product speculation really that interesting to people? Maybe it's fun to have that initial thought on what emerging tech could be, but Apple speculation quickly escalates into a never-ending stream of annoyance that builds expectations up to an unachievable level.
+5 Painfully True
Multi-tasking is a bad idea. Most users are not computer professionals.
The iPhone's refusal to adopt Flash, coupled with its huge popularity, is among the greatest forces driving development away from Flash and towards alternate platforms. This is a good thing.
Exactly, god forbid someone wants to use Skype for video conferencing!
If there's one thing history teaches about rumors regarding upcoming Apple products, it's that nobody talking knows anything. If anyone gets any Apple-product prediction right it's because enough monkeys pounding on typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare.
Remember how the iPad was supposed to have a front-facing camera, an awesome chess game, full 1080p HD video, solar charging, biometric security, etc. - and wasn't going to just be a fat iPod Touch? Yeah.
Sure the next iPhone will be an improvement. Duh. Anything more than that is pure rampant rabid speculation.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I present to you, the iPad Nano!
The front facing camera would be in addition to the higher resolution camera at the rear. It would be used for video conferencing.
The video camera could be HD and shoot at 720p.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Internally, 420p is completely plausible. however, that's not the idea... With NFC, and an appropriate receiver (or a simple dock and cable) 1080p connection to a TV is completely within reason. Further, a tiny adjustment to the mini displayport on upcoming mac notebooks (and PCs as well, since it's part of the standard), and video in to a notebook through playback on an iPod/iPhone is completely plausible.
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Good Grief. I have a first-gen iPhone, and will consider upgrading when the next version comes out. So you can expect that I'm excited about the possible specs on. But, really, the linked article is a ridiculous i-gasm. If you are going to report this stuff, stick to the original sources, rather than linking to second-hand articles that lace their copy with unabashed fanboy-ism. If you want color commentary along with your tech news, check out the relevant post on Engadget.
What actually kicked off this latest wave of speculation was an an article from the Wall Street Journal, stating that Apple is developing a CDMA version of the iphone for Verizon. The WSJ is a fairly reputable source that wouldn't print unless they had some solid evidence, so this should be interpreted as a bit more than a typical rumor.
And then, 24 hours later, they will all get their dupe too. And then another 24 hours later half of those will get a second dupe because the posters don't even read Slashdot themselves.
And do you seriously think iPhone has the CPU capability to crunch 1080p H.264 video?
With the iPad and probably a new iPhone leveraging much more computing power, I can imagine an iPhone 4.0 software that will also make the current iPhones run like dogs, and I would not be surprised to see such an OS by the end of this year. This would not be so much of an issue but most of us sign two year contracts, but the OS seems to make hardware obsolete in 18 months. I sure wish that Apple would let us pay 50 dollars for to reduce the contract terms to one year. That is what I used to with phones.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If this is true then it's really no suprise, particularly regarding the screen resolution.
Many pointed out the issue of having to cater to different screen sizes with Android and touted the iPhone as a superior platform for development because it's hardware is static.
I've long said that it's not realistically going to stay that way, with the iPhone you already have differences between existing models that you must cater too in terms of performance and certain features. It's not suprising that resolution is now something you will also have to deal with, because the iPhone was already running at half the resolution of the likes of the Nexus One.
Of course, you might say that Apple will automatically scale apps, which is an option, but that just means the apps wont be making any use of the higher resolution.
It'll be interesting to see how Apple handles this, and with the iPad coming too, developers for Apple's platform are going to have to cater to differences just as with Android, and just as developers of desktop apps have always had to.
Realistically it could only ever be a pipe dream to keep the hardware static, else the phone would simply get dated and no other platforms based on the technology (i.e. the iPad) could ever be released. If this is true it's really a vindication of the fact that if you want your platform to advance, and stay relevant, there's no hiding behind the supposed advantage of having a static hardware platform for the sake of easier development. Developers are going to have to work and deal with differences over time regardless whether they're developing for Windows, Android or the iPhone.
Do any iPhone developers here know whether this means existing applications might have to be updated to support different resolutions? It'll be a massive job if so, so I'm guessing by default the new iPhone will indeed just scale graphics or something to start with unless an application specifically handles differing resolutions?
Can I install my software without Apple's permission yet?
Can I assign my songs directly as ringtones yet?
Can I add my own audio and video codecs yet?
Can I take my phone to another carrier without Apple trying to brick my phone with a firmware update yet?
Can I multitask yet?
Can I use Flash (and watch Hulu) yet?
Yep, I think my n900 is still the phone for nerds. I have a philosophical issue with Apple telling me what i can and can't do with hardware I purchased, when there is no technical reason I cannot do it. I sacrifice a little convenience (the huge app store, Apple's admittedly-slick interface) for my freedom.
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So taking pictures of yourself is more important than having a prevew of what you are taking a picture of so it will come out level and properly framed? I fear for the future of photos...
A front facing camera - in addition to the normal one on the back - has been common on other phones for many years. They were part of one of the launching features of 3G - video calls. Unfortunately for the phone companies hoping that this would increase traffic and revenue, noone liked holding their phones half a meter in front of them to do a call and the technology is still unused.
Personally, I hope Apple doesn't add one. It's pointless, and takes space/cost that could be used for other things. I had one on my Nokia N95, and used it once.
is there some reason why a camera cannot be flexible to face whatever direction the user wants?
Moving parts, hinges, even rotating mirrors, are failure-prone and take a lot of space. Most phone with front-facing cameras use two smaller lenses instead and leave out any moving parts -- my 4-year-old Sony Ericsson K610 has a VGA front camera for videoconferencing and a 2MP rear-facing camera for proper pictures. I am pretty sure that the iPhone will use the same concept.
Considering your average camera phone lens can barely resolve a barcode, I'm not quite sure what the point of HD shooting would be.
Considering your average camera phone lens can barely resolve a barcode, I'm not quite sure what the point of HD shooting would be.
HD Barcodes?
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Adobe can't code their way out of a wet paper bag unless it's x86 Windows. So honest to $deity I hope not.
What? Adobe can't code on Windows, either. There was a time when they could do it on the Mac, but that ended about the time System 7 came out.
If you look at what flash does, and compare it to some other similar system, you'll find it doesn't do much and it's horribly inefficient at what it does. There are loads of game engines which have been melded with a scripting engine which do the same kind of stuff at much higher levels of performance, probably mostly because they're not reinventing wheels. They're using standard libraries for drawing and they're using existing scripting engines like Lua and Python, meaning they don't have to try to make an efficient, optimized scripting engine either. If Adobe had gone with one of these languages instead of inventing their own, the world would be a better place today. Or at least, the web would.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
3G elsewhere in the world isn't as bad as in US. Here you can get unlimited 5Mbit/s 3G for $30 a month and its stable connection. Hell, we already have 4G in largest cities (128 Mbit/s downlink and 56 Mbit/s uplink)
That's a bit of stretch, especially since the iPhone currently doesn't support any of the alternatives to Flash either (Silverlight, Java, HTML5).
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Not that the non-Apple-prohibition on multitasking is really useful, but that sequence of steps can be shortened - the apps save state when the home button is pressed (or really should - the apple ones like sms, email etc do), so step 1 and 2 are the same. Locate app and open app can be combined - if it's on the same screen then you just need to touch, else swipe and touch.
8 and 9 are not needed - the app opens to where it was when you pressed the home button in step 1.
Paste.
Step 11 can be removed with careful copying - you just added it to pad the list.
I want the ability to enable multitasking for non-Apple apps as much as the next person, but the iPhone UI was designed from the outset to not need it - it would just be useful to have. Sort of like the one button mouse on OS X - you can do everything in the OS with the left mouse button *only*, but adding the context click with the right mouse button adds usefulness. It's not a requirement. (and yes, I have a Microsoft 2 button mouse with scrollwheel on my iMac, the computer police can come and arrest me any time).
No Flash on extremely popular devices is a good thin. It forces people to stop using Flash where there's no reason to use it, such as navigation and video.
you dont even need an iphone type device for that. A year and a half back i worked on a webshop, and the program manager had me make a jpg/javascript fall back for the flash menu because google analytics showed that 1% of the visitors didnt have flash. When the main goal of your website is getting people in, and getting them to spend money, management will have programmers bending over backwards to support even IE 5.0 if they think they will make an extra buck.
Granted, the only reason the navigation on that site was simple, and flash was only used to make things flashy...
People, what a bunch of bastards
Tell me, what is one of the most popular apps on multi tasking phones? Memory cleanup programs.
Then why haven't I needed such program with Symbian (apart from the early 2000 phones) nor Windows Mobile?
Besides, why would you need a memory cleanup program? You can just close the program that is taking too much memory.
Fantastic. Now I can use my iPhone in all the places my iPod Touch works! (geddit?)
The A4 CPU is already in the iPad, so you could have been familiar with it. It's basically a "system on a chip", like the SnapDragon, designed and developed by Apple themselves. It's basically a Cortex-A8 CPU core combined with a PowerVR SGX GPU in one device.
It runs at 1 GHz, it's pretty powerful for the amount of power it consumes and it looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipad-a4.jpg
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I'm impressed by its resolution, which is purported to be 960 x 640, according to engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/wsj-apple-developing-new-iphone-plus-another-for-verizon/
That's a step-up from the rest of the pack, including the "super-phone" EVO 4G. I'm wondering if this also means a step-up in overall screen size.
Regardless of where you fall in the iPhone fan/hate camp, you have to admit competition breeds excellence.
Now if only we could do something about the locked-in phones, 2 year contracts, "subsidized" loan plans, and uncompetitive wireless market in the US.
I always hear that Linux gets the short-end of the Flash stick.
Flash is buggy and unstable on all platforms. Since I run nightly builds of Firefox on Windows with out-of-process plugins, I haven't had one single Firefox crash. However, I've seen Flash crash left and right. Apple's crash reports show Flash is the number one cause of application crashes on their platform.
Linux support used to be terrible. The Linux player was way behind, and Adobe didn't seem to care to update it.
Today Linux is the only platform you can get an official 64-bit version of Flash. One can argue that Adobe has treated Linux better than the other platforms by giving them a 64-bit Flash before anyone else.
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Better 3G chip to go with all the carriers that have rolled out various kinds of HSDPA
Same CPU as the iPad (or more likely a version that cuts back the speed and power consumption to account for the smaller battery on the iPhone)
No multitasking (regardless of battery life concerns, Apple would need to "ruin" its perfect UI with some kind of task switcher feature)
No front facing camera (video calling has not taken off in the way phone carriers would like, especially in the US. AFAIK its almost non-existent on AT&T)
Rewritten bootloaders and security to make jailbreaking and unlocking harder
I suspect 802.11n will appear IF apple can find a low power chip that doesn't require devoting too much of the internal space of the iPhone to the antenna.
I predict that there will still be no support for:
Loading apps without going through the app store
Fast 2D drawing APIs (CoreSurface or whatever it is) being able to be used in official apps
External keyboards of any kind
Any peripheral where Apple doesn't get a cut from every unit sold.
Any kind of ability for apps to share data files with each other
Any kind of ability to load arbitrary files onto an iPhone (i.e. a generic "documents" folder)
I also predict that there will continue to be many reasons Apple will reject your app submission, all of which exist as official policy at Apple (and are known to the app store reviewers) and none of which Apple will ever disclose to developers. One of these "unwritten rules" is likely "no apps that mean less revenue for Apple carrier partners such as AT&T"
I heard that it will have a 12 inch screen that rolls up into a 3" diameter so you can stick it in your pants. Nerds finally get a toy that impresses the ladies. Did I mention that when the phone is set to vibrate . . .
App Store is a seriously controlled environment and they already impose strict guidelines for developers. How does an idle application even eat up more battery? It's not like your RAM needs more power if it's used a little bit more. The background app doesn't need to do any drawing and is usually on pause (unless it needs to do certain tasks in the background, and then it makes sense).
Because the apps you want multitasking for aren't idle. That's the whole point. If an app doesn't have anything to do in the background, then who cares if it quits when you click the home button? Aside from a slightly longer start time, you won't even notice. The whole idea is to have IM apps that run constantly and music apps like Pandora and Last.fm that continue playing when you switch to another app.
Because you have to travel the menus to locate your app you just switched out from and load up whatever you were doing, and even to perform a quick copy-paste you need to:
1) save your document
2) close app 1
3) locate app 2
4) open app 2
5) copy
6) close app 2
7) locate app 1
8) load up the document you were working with
9) scroll to the point you wanted to paste to
10) paste
11) do the same again because your copypaste missed something
Yeah, seems really convenient and simple.
Your list has nothing to do with multitasking... It's entirely about switching between applications. If today's iPhone had 3rd party multitasking, the steps you listed wouldn't change, except:
Step 1: I haven't seen an iPhone app with a "save" gesture. Maybe some of them exist, but most apps just save your changes automatically.
Steps 8 & 9: Good iPhone apps (which, admittedly, is a small set) take care of these for you by saving their state when you quit.
Have you considered a career at Apple?
Note to sensationalist Slashdot mods. This is a rumor, that's significant info, note that in the title. Please say that /. hasn't degraded to the point of disguising apple rumors as legit stories on the homepage. Feel free to mod this down but some long time /. readers have got to be thinking the same thing.
App Store is a seriously controlled environment and they already impose strict guidelines for developers. How does an idle application even eat up more battery? It's not like your RAM needs more power if it's used a little bit more. The background app doesn't need to do any drawing and is usually on pause (unless it needs to do certain tasks in the background, and then it makes sense).
Really, are you joking? The vast majority of apps that would work well as backgrounded apps are network connected apps. Things like IM clients, GPS tracking, etc. When you're looking at a cellphone, "drawing" is hardly the biggest power draw, think about 3g, turning the antenna on and constantly transmitting, and using GPS. Big drains.
I want the ability to play streaming music and use the GPS at the same time. Think about where I want to use that: In my car, with its own portable power plant. I, like most people with a longer commute, have a power adapter for my car. Battery life doesn't matter when you're plugged in. In fact, if Apple just enabled 3rd party multitasking only when plugged in I'd be thrilled.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.