Ted Avery

By: Ted Avery

This Saturday, Palm will release its new, much-hyped smartphone, the Palm Pre, into the wild on America’s Sprint Network. Many tech writers have already been given devices to review, and the results are in: The Palm Pre is an amazing, responsive, feature-packed device that has been deemed as the Apple iPhone’s biggest contender. From the beginning, this device has been built to accommodate to many of the aspects of the iPhone that people always complained about, such as a lack of multiple applications running at once, lack of copy and paste, lack of MMS, poor camera, lack of video recording, and more. In true Apple fashion, Apple has remained mostly quiet about how it plans to evolve the iPhone to remain competitive, but don’t let that make you think Apple is standing idly by. Walt Mossberg, the principal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, just completed his review of the Pre, and in his review states “Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I’d note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations.” (source)

Yes, it has been long rumoured, and pretty much guaranteed, that Apple will be announcing a new iPhone this Monday during its keynote speech at its WWDC conference. Rumours began almost immediately after the iPhone 3G was released, and after absorbing all this news for the past year, here is my take on what I think the new iPhone is going to look like.

What we already know

A lot of improved functionality for the iPhone has already been announced and will already be arriving in the form of a software update, which will luckily be compatible with the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone as well. Features like stereo Bluetooth, MMS support, Copy and Paste, “Spotlight” search across your phone, e-mailing of multiple photos, tethering with your computer, improvements to the calendar, voice memos, turn by turn GPS directions, voice communication in apps, and more. Most of this is covered in the excellent Gizmodo article “iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know”.

One key feature of this update will be the long-awaited Push Notification service, Apple’s answer to a lack of background applications. And honestly, it makes a lot of sense. Say you are using an app to chat with your friends on MSN Messenger, but want to go make a phone call without having to close the messaging app. Other smart phones would require you to leave the entire application running to remain signed in, but there really is no purpose in wasting your battery life like that. Instead, you can close the application while you remain signed in on the application’s server, and when someone actually wants to message you, an alert will pop up on your iPhone. This is a far more effective solution that gives all the hard work to the server, accomplishing the same things a background application would but using a fraction of the battery power.

What is pretty much guaranteed

• Increased storage capacity, Better battery life, more RAM, and a faster processor: Simple hardware upgrades are always a pretty much guarantee when new hardware is released. Even when the 2^nd generation iPod Touch was released after the iPhone 3G, it was already sporting a more powerful processor than the iPhone 3G had. Expect all the hardware to improve, with storage capacity of up to 32GB.
• A better camera: Whether it be industry analysts, picking apart Apple’s patents, or just the fact that Apple really needs to come up to speed with the other smart phones out there, all signs point to a better camera in the new iPhone. This will almost definitely mean an increase to 3.2 megapixels, but there have also been rumours
• Video recording: The new feature-packed iPhone OS 3.0 (more on that later) has already had beta versions seeded to developers to prepare their apps for compatibility with the new iPhone OS. The beta OS has been picked to pieces, and a full video recording interface was discovered within it. This is definitely coming. (source)
• The ability to download movies and TV shows from iTunes to your phone: Not only were screenshots leaked of an iPhone interface to do this, but it was actually possible to browse this interface on Apple’s web server for a short time before Apple pulled it down. This is coming, but will most likely be when connected to a wi-fi network only.

The rumours I think are likely to happen

• A front facing camera with video calling: There have been a few articles digging up patents filed by Apple showing a camera on the front of the iPhone. Combined with some (possibly fake) leaked images from Fido’s roadmap of 2009 that indicate video calling capabilities, I think this is a real possibility. It would make sense for Apple to extend the iChat brand on their Mac to the iPhone., but even if Apple doesn’t do this themselves, I think it will definitely come in the form of a third party application. Every aspect of the iPhone’s hardware has been available to all app developers so far, like the camera, GPS, and accelerometer. Since video recording is almost a guarantee, Apple would naturally make this aspect of the phone available to applications as well, opening the door to many possibilities of video chat applications.
• A cheaper lower-end iPhone model: The current rumoured model is a 4GB iPhone for $99. This is simply a rumour that has appeared so many times for so many reasons that I think it is quite likely to happen. Not to mention the fact that it would be a great way to gain an even greater market share than Apple already has with its mobile smart phone operating system.
• Turn by turn GPS with Google Street View: Here’s a rumour you won’t see anywhere else (as far as I know) and is more my own theory, but a theory I think makes very much sense. The iPhone 3G has GPS capabilities, but in a very basic form of a blinking dot on a map. It has been lacking turn-by-turn directions that you would see on dedicated GPS devices that mount to your car windshield. Additionally, Apple has placed a strange, unexplained restriction on applications making use of the GPS for turn-by-turn directions, but has already announced to lift this restriction for the new iPhone OS. So why the change of heart, and why restrict it in the first place? I believe Apple wanted to implement this feature themselves before any third-party apps would, and will deploy it in the new iPhone OS 3.0. If this does become a standard feature of the iPhone, it only makes sense to me that it would be incorporated into the maps app. The maps app is entirely powered by Google Maps and Google Street view, so what better way to incorporate 3D turn by turn directions than by overlaying the roads on actual 3D images of your surroundings? And with Google rushing to get Street View supported in Canada this year, I think this is a more than likely solution.

The leftovers

There are a few more rumours that have come up a few times, but nothing else I personally feel is likely enough to be worth mentioning. Regardless of all the rumours, Apple always seems to be able to keep some key features under wraps that always surprise everyone. So let the speculation continue this weekend, but be sure to check the news come Monday afternoon after Apple’s keynote speech for all the official details.