[Ben]

I don't know about you, but every time I see one of the leaked iPhone pictures now I can't help but totally crave one. The design just looks so much cleaner than the 3GS, and side by side the 3GS looks a little dated now.

I lasted, ohh, about 72 hours before getting the 3GS? I can feel a pre-order coming on for the next model...

http://images.macrumors.com/article/2010/05/14/133312-500x_comp4.jpg

[hecatae]

does it have a micro usb port

[DBMandrake]

does it have a micro usb port
Nope. Why would you want that ?

[Ben]

does it have a micro usb port

C'mon, this is Apple we're talking about, here!

It does appear to have a camera 'flash', though. I don't think the shape will be as pocket friendly as the 3G/S but it doesn't half look good.

[@NickyColman]

I've been trying my best not to look at it because its making me want one sooo bad.

C'MON JUNE/JULY!

[miffed]

Don't really want one at the moment (just like I didn't want the 3GS !)

I have just got the HTC Desire , I this time I really do think that will be enough for me. I still think my 32GB 3GS is a formidable beast and the fact that it will no longer be the current flagship will not change that.

.....But we all know how it goes , don't we ? - At the very least I am hoping I will hold out until upgrade time (soonest one is January I think !) Really depends how much better it is , Had the 3GS been simply the camera improvement and not such a great speed boost , then I certainly wouldn't have bothered - So if the new iPhone does turn out to be all about the camera, flash and aesthetics I'll be able to hold off pretty easily

[Ben]

But... miffed! New case!! ;)

I was sceptical about the 3GS - it's hard to drop so much money on something that looks identical to the thing you've already got. This time around, however, my brain has no such reservations. For better or for worse!

[Hands0n]

And yet another Dock! Of course, rendering any previous Dock obsolete and redundant. I know its Apple but it still grates quite a bit. No doubt all the existing accessories and cables are not going to be compatible either. I used to, and still do, hate Nokia for doing that kind of stuff.

The new case does not look quite so resilient as former iPhone models. That aluminium surround looks too easy to scuff up should it hit the deck - not that anyone should be dropping £500+ iPhones on the floor (someone tell my daughter that, she's on her fifth in less than a year!!). So the new 4G looks a bit more fragile to me. Larger too, or at least a more bulky shape.

Hmmm, well, with all that said and done, it would be completely churlish not to pick one up when they become available :D

[Ben]

There's no denying that the 3G/S is a phenomenal design - it catapulted the iPhone from obscurity to mainstream, and I think it'll always be remembered as a game changer.

I'm sure this new casing will have its faults; indeed, you've found a few likely ones already! Lets just hope it's more practical than initial appearances suggest.

As for your daughter... fifth?! There should be some sort of law against that. We may have to set up a charitable organisation... RSPi ;)

[Hands0n]

LOL. yea, fifth!! Four she dropped while holding it silly - the latest was she tried to prop it between her shoulder and ear to be hands free in the bathroom (ceramic tiled floor) ignoring the fact that iPhones are shiny and slippery. The inevitable happened. She's now booking an on-site repair for £85 from some outfit in London. The time before last she had only had the phone 48 hours, left it on the floor at a friends house and their cat decided to "mark" it which they do by directing a jet of urine at whatever it is they're marking. Said pee-pee entered the handset at the Home button and the rest was history :D The mobile operator exchanged the brand new iPhone under the 14-day rule for a faulty button - she received a used [and cosmetically damaged] replacement!

Not had much luck with iPhones, that one hasn't :D

[miffed]

Glad it's not just me !! - See my plan was , that my iPhones would serve their lives , then I would retire them in almost pristine condition (despte heavy use ) - and over the years my Phone shelf would be like a little museum , But it didn't pan out that way !

iPhone 2G , I used for 8 months or so , barely a scratch - Passed it on to wife when I got the 3G , Who passed it onto youngest daughter , who battered the life out of it then put it through the washing machine :( (TBH this is the one that saddened me the most )

iPhone 3G Used it till I got the 3GS , then passed it onto wife , who used it for a while , then passed it onto Youngest daughter when she put the 2G through the washing machine & wife bought herself a 3GS - Within a month or so it was battered , couple of months screen was broken , then as of a month ago she lost it in a Taxi (not that it was worth anything by then !! )

She is currently destroying / using a Blackberry 9700 ... this time she has paid for it herself , so hopefully she'll be a little more careful !

Really gutted about the 2G ,out of all the iPhones it was my favourite , would have been nice to keep it !

[Ben]

Oh definitely WRT the 2G. I didn't buy it on principal, but looking back now it'd be one of those few phones I'd like to have 'collected'. Shame it came to such an unfortunate end!

I can't remember breaking or losing a phone. I've had faulty ones, but who hasn't. Slightly more worrying is that I still have most phones I've ever owned knocking around somewhere...

[miffed]

I actually tried to charge it a few days ago and it actually boots up now !! The screen looks a little funny , and the home button doesn't work , I came VERY close to buying a new rear case , screen, bezel and Antenna cover from eBay to restore it , but that'd be silly , especially as they can be picked up for aorund £125 on flea bay now
OK so the antenna cover was a bit iof a botch , but I really did like the aesthetics of the 2G , if felt like , Well , exactly what it is !! ....A lump of metal and glass in your hand , much more solid than the 3G / 3GS . and I liked the way that the screen went right up to the bezel - the only thing that let it down was the plastic volume /wake keys and the Antenna cover.

Definately got a soft spot for the 2G , and If I am not mistaken the the 4G takes a few styling cues from the 2G too

[Ben]

Seems that the spec has now leaked: http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2010/05/19/Detailed-4th-Generation-iPhone-Specs-Leak/p1

This is shaping up to be one hell of a phone! Certainly no red flags in there.

[DBMandrake]

The only red flag for me is the claim it will have 512MB of ram - what do they base that on ?

Previous examinations of the part numbers on the chip in the Vietnamese leak showed the same A4 processor as the iPad, which means it should have 256MB of ram.

If it really does have 512MB of ram, then the question becomes, why does the next iPhone have 512MB of ram but the iPad only has 256MB ?

That, and the lack of a camera for skype use is reason enough to skip the 1st gen iPad for me...

[DBMandrake]

I've been thinking a bit more about the as yet un-revealed specs of the new iPhone, and I have a few thoughts.

The first one is 900Mhz 3G support (eg going from tri-band 3G to quad-band 3G) - now that 900Mhz 3G is on the horizon in the UK, the lack of 900Mhz 3G would be a serious handicap in my opinion. When the iPhone 3G was released in 2008 I was disappointed that 900Mhz 3G was not supported - and living in New Zealand at the time it was something of a handicap even then as Vodafone NZ was already rolling out 3G on 900Mhz in rural areas...(so I was limited to GPRS outside large cities - no EDGE either)

The 3GS was released in 2009 and still didn't support 900Mhz 3G and then this year the iPad 3G was released and it still doesn't support 900Mhz 3G. In fact, the 3G chipset in the iPad is identical to the 3GS, which is almost identical to the 3G. Apple really needs to do something about this.

The next issue is lack of HSUPA - again, none of the current devices support it, including the iPad, but I am almost certain the new iPhone will have a new 3G chipset which includes HSUPA.

Why ? Because of the front facing camera. Without HSUPA, the theoretical maximum upstream speed is 384kbit, in practice it is more like 340kbit, and this is very marginal for 2 way video. Yes it would work, sort of, but it wouldn't be a good user experience, and Apple would rather not do something at all, than do a half arsed job of it, as they've shown time and again.

I now believe that Apple wanted to include a front facing camera on the iPhone 3GS, but decided they could not do so without an HSUPA chipset to provide enough upstream bandwidth for it to work well, and for whatever reason they felt they didn't have a suitable chipset that met their requirements for size, power consumption, cost, production scale etc, so the front facing camera was scrapped for the 3GS.

I also think they planned to include a front facing camera on the iPad, but again a suitable HSUPA chipset wasn't ready in time - so at a relatively late phase in development they decided to stick with the 3GS HSDPA chipset in the first iPad 3G model. There were still SDK references to a front facing camera in the early version of the iPad SDK that were later removed, so obviously there were prototypes with cameras, like like the ipod touch prototype that was discovered with a camera recently.

Why would the lack of HSUPA chipset in the 3G model affect whether the iPad Wifi had a camera ? Well, they couldn't exactly put one in the Wifi model but not the 3G model, but if they put it in the 3G model as well and it doesn't work properly over 3G (especially on a screen that size that needs a decent bitrate to give a good picture) then the end result is going to be a disappointment, so they'd rather leave it out entirely.

The iPhone 4G is probably about 6 months later in its development cycle than the iPad, (from what I read, the current ipad hardware was essentially finalized the middle of last year) so it seems likely that it will be the first device with a front facing camera and an HSUPA chipset. I'm almost sure that we'll see a front facing camera in next years iPad due to inclusion of an HSUPA chipset.

Another thing I'm hoping for in the next iPhone is a better GPS chipset - as much as I love the fact my iPhone has GPS, it really is quite poor at locking on in weak signal conditions, and accuracy is not great. (One reason is that it can only monitor 8 satellites at once - better quality chipsets can monitor as many as 12 at once)

They also did something to the software in 3.0 that absolutely killed the accuracy of the GPS - I had a 3G running 2.2.1 and the GPS was amazingly accurate, you could literally walk a few steps on the ground and see your position and speed update with only a couple of second delay - and while driving it would keep right up with where you were. Ever since 3.0 the GPS often takes a long time to lock, and won't respond to small positional changes - you can walk 5-10 metres and your position on the map won't change, it only seems to change if you walk more than about half the accuracy circle. We have two 3G and one 3GS around the house and they all have the same problem, so they really screwed something up. (I think they're doing some sort of accuracy based smoothing to "prevent" small movements that could be caused by accuracy errors, but in the process any actual small movements are being filtered out entirely)

The iPad has a new GPS chipset and I've read reviews of side by side comparisons with the iPhone 3GS GPS and while some of it may be software, the verdict was the GPS in the iPad was not only much more sensitive to signal than the 3GS, it was also far more accurate, and more importantly its update speed is far better without any of the sticking the 3GS does where your position appears to stay the same then jumps a great distance.

Fingers crossed for the new GPS chipset to be included in the next Gen iPhone... :)

[Ben]

3G at 900MHz would be nice to be sure, but here in the UK I don't think it's going to be widespread within the next couple of years given all of the regulatory and legal tussling going on. The networks would prefer nobody gets to use it rather than any of them come out of the situation with any technical advantage.

HSUPA, on the other hand, is surely a must. Apps like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention old-fashioned email, utilise the upstream as we share increasingly larger pictures and videos. Video conferencing aside, I think HSUPA would be a notable omission this time around if Apple decide to go without. As you artfully argue, the front facing camera may well make HSUPA a necessity if Apple wants to provide any reasonable quality when using video over 3G networks.

Can't see the operators warming to IP video calling, though. Not when they charge 50ppm for circuit switched! Or at least I think they're circuit switched...

[gorilla]

I've been saying for a long time now that I will not be getting the next gen iPhone. Nothing has changed, but I am waiting to see what's announced. I plan to buy the HTC Desire, so unless the new iPhone is cheaper (sim free or PAYG) or has some serious hardware (front facing camera does not constitute that) then in a couple of weeks I should be an Android fanboy.

There's been enough speculation and a few leaks to give us all an idea and I'm just not that excited. I feel almost like I've done the iPhone and want to experience something else. There's nothing wrong with Apple or the iPhone, I'm just bored with it and sometimes a little frustrated by the restrictions Apple places on the platform. I'm actually thinking that I'll buy an Android phone and the basic iPad model and tether the two! That way I get the best of both worlds.

[solo12002]

new iphonehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVIxXBKesvg or the press releae:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/06/07iphone.html I know it now on the o2 site information wise. nothing so far on any of the others

Another load of cash for apple.

[The Mullet of G]

Well it looks nice, its kinda hard to get excited about it though as we've already seen it, and most of the new features are standard affair on most other smartphones, new screen is pretty sweet though. Also something in the wording about the FaceTime video calling thing had me raising an eyebrow "iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi" this would seem to indicate that its only available via Wi-Fi?

[Ben]

Indeed it is for now, they appear to want a 'new' video calling system whereby you can jump in from a normal voice call. That's how I understood it, anyway. They'll be working with operators to bring the functionality to the cellular networks in time.

Gyroscope is a nice addition to the accelerometer for gaming etc. Camera components should continue to be high quality, but the increased resolution and flash will be most welcome. As for how good the A4 chip and bigger battery are... time will tell!

[Hands0n]

Also something in the wording about the FaceTime video calling thing had me raising an eyebrow "iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi" this would seem to indicate that its only available via Wi-Fi?

I am not sure why they are making mention of WiFi other than it is the only means that FaceTime will communicate right now. That is, it won't use the 3G airtime interface. However, although it is using WiFi there is no implication that both devices need to be on the same network. In the video presentation on the Apple website they show mum and baby holding a video call with dad who is very obviously elsewhere. That, then, suggests that there is something funky going on.

Without knowing any more specific detail I suspect that Apple are running FaceTime servers somewhere in their cloud to maintain "presence" information about the handset. Similar to how typical IM systems work. That way Mum and Dad are able to "connect" with each other when both parties are present on the Internet.

In this way Apple have neatly sidestepped the mobile network operators for now. Later, if and when they weaken, I suspect that we'll see FaceTime operating across the 3D data path. But I do not believe, at this stage, that the iPhone 4 will work to traditional video call capable handsets. Perhaps by way of a future firmware update it may.

Or it may just force the mobile network operators to liberalise their video call tariffs to make them affordable such that the facility finally gets off the ground.

Couldn't happen? I think it takes a brave soul to challenge the iPhone these days :D It has a good track record of breaking moulds and setting the bar height. I can't see anything much changing that in the short term.

[DBMandrake]

Although not 100% confirmed, it does appear that the iPhone 4 includes 512MB of ram :D

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/17/iphone-4-confirmed-to-have-512mb-of-ram-twice-the-ipad-and-3gs/

This is compared to the 256MB ram of the iPad, 3GS, and 3rd gen iPod touch, and the 128MB of ram of the 3G and all earlier models.

This would seem to indicate if true that the "A4" chip in the iPhone 4 is different to the one in the iPad, since the RAM is on chip.

(It also indicates that the iPhone 4 is a much newer design than the current iPad, which may have been in the works for quite some time now....)

This is really good news, and keeps the iPhone competitive with the likes of the Nexus One which also has 512MB ram, and I expect multitasking and task switching on the iPhone 4 to be extremely nice.

I've been using jail broken multitasking on my 3GS (using Kirikae and Backgrounder) for a long time now, and even with 256MB of ram it does a VERY nice job of multitasking - I literally have to open about 10-12 different apps in the background at once before it starts slowing down or running out of ram, and that's 10-12 apps actually executing in the background, not just sitting suspended in the background like Apple's implementation.

With 512MB and task suspension the iPhone 4 should be able to have practically every app installed on the device suspended in the background in RAM and ready to launch instantly where it left off, as well as a few apps actually running in the background like Pandora and Navigon.

Meanwhile jailbroken multitasking on an iPhone 3G with 128MB ram is painful indeed, you can open 2-3 small background apps without too much bother, but any more than that, or even one big app in the background and you run out of ram, the whole UI starts stuttering, and background apps get killed off.

256MB of ram definitely seems to be the sweet spot for the current iPhone OS so 512MB is almost an extravagant luxury. :)

[DBMandrake]

Very official looking confirmation of 512MB:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/17/apple_posts_wwdc_session_videos_to_itunes_u.html

Downloading some of the sessions to watch for myself - including the ones on multitasking. (I knew that developer login that I created 2 years ago and never used would be useful one day :) )

[Ben]

512MB is going to be great for multitasking iPhone apps. This important improvement should increase the longevity of iPhone 4.

[Hands0n]

This important improvement should increase the longevity of iPhone 4.

No it won't. Apple will bring out the iPhone 5 when it suits them and we'll all want one :D

[@NickyColman]

LMAO! I cant believe the white 2006 version of the iMac I bought came with 512MB RAM in it.

Terrifying how fast the technology moves!

[Ben]

Terrifying how fast the technology moves!
It is! Day-to-day it seems like things can't move quickly enough, but put things into the perspective of a few years and, with computing especially, we're doing rather well :)

[DBMandrake]

It's easy to forget that Moores law (which predicts a doubling of computer power every 12-18 months) actually defines an exponential growth curve, and the human brain is not good at comprehending exponential growth.

A great example is the old game of take a chess board and place one grain of rice in the first square, two grains in the second square, 4 grains in the third square etc, doubling for every square. Not only can you not fit enough rice on the board to complete it, 2 to the power of 63 is so huge there isn't enough rice in existence to complete it! :D

So who knows where we will be with computers in 64 years ;)

[DBMandrake]

Indeed it is for now, they appear to want a 'new' video calling system whereby you can jump in from a normal voice call. That's how I understood it, anyway. They'll be working with operators to bring the functionality to the cellular networks in time.

Don't throw out that Mifi just yet :D

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/25/iphone-4-facetime-over-a-mifi-connection-because-we-had-to-try/

Check the second video down - a Facetime call being made over a Mifi on the Three network, and the quality looks almost perfect. :) (Compared to the Verizon Mifi in the US in the first video where it wasn't that usable...)

Does anyone know if the Three Mifi has HSUPA ? If it does it's no surprise you can get a decent Facetime call over it, as Three's network do have very good QoS traffic shaping on their network which gives nice smooth transfers with low jitter or bursting...

Any of you iPhone 4 users with Three Mifi's tried Facetime calls using it yet ? :)

[Ben]

I'm yet to try FaceTime at all :/ Hopefully soon!

I think MiFi is HSPA, yes... seem to have a memory of fast upload speeds!

I've read reports that if you call a contact directly from the FaceTime button in Contacts that it doesn't even initiate a cellular call, i.e. it all goes over WiFi and for free. Can anyone corroborate?

[DBMandrake]

Yes that appears to be the case - there are reports of people making Facetime calls in Airplane mode with only Wifi turned on - as long as you initiate Facetime directly from contacts, a cellular connection is not required :)

It looks like Apple runs some kind of rendezvous server which uses your mobile phone number as the identity, but nothing more. What isn't clear, is whether you can receive a Facetime call only with Wifi - eg does some kind of push notification come in over the data connection to initiate a Facetime call ? Easy to test though for you lucky ones with iPhone 4's ;)

[Hands0n]

MiFi is definitely HSPA :)