All quiet on the Apple front for a while. Macword 2009 was remembered for being, well, not that rememberable. Big Steve is on a leave of absence to get his health issues sorted. And for once the blogs and fanboys seem to have died down a bit. (Until this leaked photo appeared on Mac Rumours). Anyway fear not, becuase deep inside Cupertino, CA, Jonathan Ive is probably (99% certain), putting the finishing touches to his design for the iPhone 3rd generation.
Now I don’t have any mates that work at Apple or any inside info, gleamed from Kevin Rose or anything. But as sure as Apples are Apples, there should be a new iPhone arriving this summer. The mobile phone industry moves fast so going more than a year without an update to the iPhone would be inviting the likes of RIM, Android devices etc to start nipping at Apple toes. Last year that monumental day was 11th July in the UK so expect to see Apple move the barriers on again around the same time this summer.
So the big question is, what are they going to do to make us all go out and exchange our 3G’s for a nice shiny new one and another 18 month contract. Well first of all no matter how much I’d personally like to see one, Apple have officially confirmed there is no iPhone Nano in the immediate future. Apparently Apple aren’t “going to play in the low-end voice phone business”.Sorry to break that but now that we’re over that check out some of the fake pictures that have been floating around recently.
Anyway without further adue, here are my predictions for the iPhone 3rd Generation…
My Predictions
- Video Calling via iChat camera (behind the screen if the patents are to be believed.
- Kickass camera (4MP at least).
- Further MobileMe cloud computing models, hedging my bets here.
- Cut and paste functionality – Come on Apple this is schoolboy.
- Stereo sound.
- Bluetooth.
- Higher Storage (32GB min?).
- Picture Messaging (MMS).
There we have it. For me the main new funtionality is going to be around video and sharing stuff via the cloud. Feel free to tell me I’m speaking a load of b******s below.