iPhone 5: speculation grows
It’s what all Apple aficionados have been waiting for: Apple have sent out invitations to the October 4th launch of the iPhone 5. The event will mark new CEO Tim Cook’s first product presentation, without Steve Jobs’ legendary cultish presence.
The lift-off will be on October 4th, 6pm GMT, and the invitation is a simple row of four Apple icons saying “Let’s talk iPhone.” It will happen at Apple’s headquarters in California, at 1, Infinite Loop, for the first time. Popherald reported that Amazon are about to launch an Android-based Kindle, a tablet computer that may be a rival to the iPad. The Mobile Indian reported that there might also be the launch of a new Facebook iPad app.
Unicorn? So what’s it gonna be? The Daily Mail reports that the company is being “typically tight-lipped” about the product – we don’t even know whether it will be an updated iPhone 4, or the unicorn-like iPhone 5 (unicorn-like in that it’s fabled, rather than that it can tell whether someone’s a virgin or not.) It posited the idea that there might be two models of the new iPhone – one with a snazzy, “A5” processor (currently residing inside the iPad2), and a less fancy one with “lower-tech components.”
“Having seen first-hand how Apple packs its staff inside its stores for iPhone launches does suggest that whatever new product they announce is imminent,” says Luke Peters, editor of T3, quoted on The Daily Mail.
Wider, thinner, bigger, smaller? It’s not very specific, said Lance Ulanoff on Mashable. It’ll be “a nice little chat”, just Tim Cook and “a few hundred of our closest friends.” There’ll be “coffee and Danish. It’ll be cozy.” He ran through the possible new features: the fact that new iPhone cases have been seen points to a major redesign. It might be thinner. It might be tapered. It might even be, shock horror, wider. The “performance bar” will be raised too, there’ll be a better screen and camera; there might even be voice recognition.
They need to keep competitive. Jon on Fonehome said that some have thought that the little ‘1’ on the invitation means there’ll only be one new handset; but considering how successful the voice recognition system in Windows’ Phone 7.5 Mango is, let’s hope that the focus will be on that.
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