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."

Comments

And this is different from the 10000 other rumors

[fulgan]

...because ?

Remarkable, though...

[vikingpower]

.... 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.

Re:And this is different from the 10000 other rumo

[BarryJacobsen]

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!

Re:And this is different from the 10000 other rumo

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, the other 10000 rumors will all get their own Slashdot articles too.

More speculating?

[Bicx]

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.

Re:More speculating?

[jo_ham]

You don't understand - this is slashdot. The rules work like this:

1. Dredge up some random rumour site from the depths of the internet with possible Apple product info. This is usually wild speculation and based on the Mountain-Dew-fueled ramblings of an Apple fan.

2. Bash this "finished product" on slashdot because it doesn't do x, y or z, or because it doesn't run Linux and use totally patent free technology.

3. Complain that Apple is getting free publicity and that they are mentioned too much.

4. Bring up comparisons to Apple in totally unrelated stories. Go to step 3 several times.

5. Apple announces product.

6. Complain that product is nothing like the rumour sites *guaranteed* it would be.

7. Complain that it's locked down (again) and that anyone who buys one for any reason is a clueless sheep.

8. Claim that the product is "proof" that Apple will soon fall.

9. Wait for netcraft to confirm it.

10. Assuming non-confirmation after two quarters of continued profitability for Apple, and large sales numbers of the "doomed" product, go to step 1.

Re:And this is different from the 10000 other rumo

[trurl7]

+5 Painfully True

Hopefully Not

[RobotRunAmok]

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.

Re:Hopefully Not

[MobyDisk]

This is a good thing.

Since you've been modded to "Interesting" I think it is fair to ask "Why?"

Re:Hopefully Not

[DJRumpy]

Here here. There is no need for Flash on a touch phone for starters (it just doesn't work), it kills the battery on pretty much any non-ac powered device, and HTML 5 looks far more promising to me.

As to the rumored phone features, I'm 'meh' about the higher resolution (pixel density is already good for that size screen) although it would make converting DVD's a bit easier as I wouldn't have to resize from the stock resolutions. The front facing camera will make self portraits a bit easier. I don't have any plans to utilize video chat. I never use it on my PC's, and I doubt I would ever use it on a phone.

Most of these selling points just seem like must haves just because someone thought they sounded like a good idea and not because they really add a 'must have' feature. I dont' know how much real world value they will bring but I'll reserve judgement until I see one. I also don't use any apps that require multi-tasking outside of the core apps, although I suppose listening to streaming radio might be a nice change from my own tunes at the gym. I think the only multi-tasking I would find handy is answering a text message without having to exit what I'm currently in. Happens at the gym fairly often. Minor inconvenience.

I'm also satisfied with the speed on the 3GS, so I don't know what the A4 will bring to the table. Possibly to better handle video chat? I suppose the only item of interest for me are the rumors of 4G support, and hopefully 'N' wireless.

Re:Hopefully Not

[Abcd1234]

The general view is that flash is a relatively closed format (yeah, it's an open spec, but let's face it, no one else has a player comparable to Adobe's implementation), based on a patented codec, wrapped up with a rather annoying DRM layer.

Personally, my view is that flash is simply annoying... it's slow, clunky, sucks up CPU time, interacts poorly with the mouse and keyboard, is only barely cross-platform (let's face it, Linux gets the short end of the Flash stick) and is generally less elegant than an integrated browser solution. Well, at least for video (I never play flash games, so if it sticks around in that niche, hey, so be it).

Re:Hopefully Not

[diskofish]

Wrong. Why do people here always pull shit out of their asses? You can download the Flex SDK and compiler for free from Adobe, and if you like, you can buy the IDE from Adobe for about $250.

Re:Hopefully Not

[delinear]

I wish they could do something about the battery life though.

They are, a faster processor, higher resolution and second camera should do something about battery life. Of course, it won't be something positive, but you can't have everything :)

Re:Hopefully Not

[Skuld-Chan]

So its ok that Apple close everything down and make it so that you have to have a signed app (drm) to run anything on their phone, but not ok that flash is a closed format?

Also you say "a patented codec" you know Flash supports about 6 different video codecs and 6 different audio formats right?

On CPU time - the only reason it sucks cpu time on the Mac is because Apple doesn't publically document hardware acceleration for video players - essentially to do video on the Mac you have to use their slow Quicktime libs. In fact the only apps that use these secret api's are made by Apple (remember how Microsoft got a lot of flak over them being the only ones using secret tools/api's on Office to give them a competitive edge?). On my windows machine app - run of the mill Flash apps never seem to approach 10% cpu overhead in a worse case scenario. I have a 933 MHz Celeron based umpc that runs Windows XP and plays all flash apps (including hulu) just fine.

The one study that was done on the Nexus One showed that playing video on Flash 10 used about 6% of the battery resources overall.

Re:Hopefully Not

[Ryvar]

iPhone battery life is, I've found, *entirely* dependent upon your location.

Placing an average of 10 5-15 minute calls a day, my iPhone 3G which is coming up on 2 years old lasts 2.5-3 days in the Boston metro area.

Back when it was 6 months old, placing 5 15-20 minute calls in the heart of San Francisco plus a little Google maps had the battery go from a full charge to completely drained in 6 hours. Similar results in the 7-8 hour range occurred on my next two visits.

Contrast to the Sprint Mogul, which consistently had a 36-hour battery life no matter where I was.

Presumably number of towers, number of competing phones, ambient radio noise and building/terrain geometry, etc. are the primary factors. Either way, my point is that this is a very relative thing: the iPhone is simultaneously the best and worst smartphone I've ever had in terms of battery life, depending on which city I'm in.

--Ryv

Re:Front facing camera?

[TheKidWho]

Exactly, god forbid someone wants to use Skype for video conferencing!

Recurring lesson about Apple

[dazedNconfuzed]

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.

Re:Recurring lesson about Apple

[L4t3r4lu5]

Sure the next iPhone will be an improvement.

It will run Android.

Zzzzzzing!

A new, innovative product!

[Computer_kid]

I present to you, the iPad Nano!

Source Article

[necro81]

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.

How will affect old stuff

[fermion]

Perhaps it is because the phones are changing so much, but Apple does not seem to be keeping to their traditional 3 years of useful life policy. I had to replace my first gen iPhone because the 3.0 software, released only two years after the iPhone, ran like a dog. Unlike a general purpose computer, the new OS get pushed through the synch process so there is little hope of keeping it off.

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.

Re:Front facing camera?

[teg]

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.

Re:front facing, rear facing

[Marcika]

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.

Re:Not so HD ?

[BarryJacobsen]

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?

Re:Multi-tasking : do not want

[pushing-robot]

Ever use a Windows Mobile device? Background tasks on mobile hardware should be avoided whenever possible. Not because it's hard to multi-task, mind you—it's just hard to enjoy a smartphone when you have to constantly hunt for random process that are killing your battery life and/or slowing your phone to a crawl.

Flash on Linux

[Enderandrew]

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.

My prediction

[jonwil]

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"

Re:And this is different from the 10000 other rumo

[dloose]

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.