The rumours (confirmed by people with reliable sources, which normally means Apple itself) say that Apple will announce the new iPhone on 12th September (to ship 19th Sept.) just over eleven months after the launch of the iPhone 4S. The rumours also say that the new iPhone will have a larger display (iOS 6 includes features for handling taller, but not wider, apps on the iPhone), the same basic physical shape (and probably exactly the same outline) and a completely new dock connector. All of this makes sense but what other changes might we see in the hardware of the new iPhone? Here are my predictions, which you should most definitely take them with a large shovel of salt because I've never been right about these things in the past.
LTE - now relatively common in Android handsets, LTE hasn't yet made an appearance in the iPhone, apparently because the chipsets consume too much power and shorten battery life by an unacceptable amount. I expect LTE to appear in the new iPhone using either a new, low-power chipset or some very cunning engineering to give the phone at least as much battery life as the 4S.
128Gb Storage - the last two iPhones (and the iPod Touch) have topped out at 64Gb and now seems like a good time to make another jump. Is there any point going beyond 128Gb? Not this year, certainly, but maybe in 2014-15.
Improved cameras - it isn't all about resolution. The camera on the iPhone 4S is simply brilliant but I predict Apple to at least tweak both the optics and the sensor to further improve performance. We might see a leap to 10Mp and a new set of lenses for the main camera and I think we are also likely to see the front-facing camera improved to allow hi-res FaceTime, which would be great over a 4G connection.
Faster CPU and GPU - nobody could accuse the 4S of being slow but Moore's law marches inevitably onwards dragging even mobile devices in its wake. Expect improvements in this area although I doubt we'll see quad-core overkill.
Updated wifi - incorporating the latest wifi standards seems like an obvious thing to do, especially after recent bumps to the specifications of Apple's wifi routers.
NFC - a programmable NFC chip that could do service as a smart card or credit card would be an ideal partner for Wallet, the new iOS 6 feature for managing payment and reward cards. Personally, I'd like to be able to use my phone as an Oyster card or a payment card so that I can cut down on the stuff I carry everyday.
None of this is particularly revolutionary - it's all been done in other phones that are currently on the market - but it'll be interesting to see what Apple come up with and how they work everything together. With any luck they'll also have something special to add to the mix that nobody has predicted; anyone want to bet?
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