Will the iPhone 5 feature a wedge or teardrop shape?Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. We’re back in the harness, with new rumors afoot about the iPhone 5‘s revised form factor. Will it be made of carbon fiber? (extremely doubtful this time around), aluminum? (considerably more probable), or stick with the current glass back? (I’m guessing likely not).
thisismynext.com’s Joshua Topolsky says that while current Internet chatter is suggesting the iPhone 5 will be little more than a speed bump (ie: A5 chip) and feature enhancement in the iPhone 4 form factor what he’s been hearing from a variety of unnamed sources is that the iPhone 5 will have a more iPod touch or mini iPad 2 look, with a larger display screen of perhaps 3.7,” retaining the present resolution, and occupying most of the device’s front face with only a slim marginal bezel, but with a larger Home button also supporting gestures.
Why not an even four-inch screen? The reasoning is that with 3.7″ diagonal and the current resolution, pixel density – the key to Apple’s Retina Display bragging rights, would drop from 326 ppi only down to 312 ppi — still comfortably above the somewhat arbitrary Retina Display technology threshold of 300 ppi. However, with a four-inch screen, pixel density with the same resolution would go down to 288 ppi.
Even with a 3.7″ screen, rendering would be somewhat less sharp than it is with the iPhone 4′s display. A good analogy is the G3 iBook and Pismo PowerBook laptops I was running back to back several years ago. Both machines had 1064 x 768 resolution displays, but the Pismo’s was 14.1″ while the iBook display was 12.1″ in physical dimension, which made its rendering significantly sharper and crisper than with the larger PowerBook’s screen.
Other rumors include an iPhone 5 with a larger display and a wedge or teardrop shape thinner than the iPhone 4 and reminiscent of the generation 2 MacBook Air.
However, here’s the thing once again; a redesign that radical for release this coming summer or even fall would not set well with a whole lot of folks who’ve just bought Verizon CDMA iPhone 4s and white iPhone 4s (expected to start selling by the end of the week — possibly as early as Wednesday April 27), who are going to be unhappy campers. A degree of this dynamic is inevitable with the release of any new product upgrade. Think of the folks who had just bought MacBook Airs last September. It happened to me when I bought an aluminum unibody MacBook three months before Apple morphed that model into the 13″ MacBook Pro with FireWire and SD Card support. However, in this instance, a radical iPhone 5 revamp release sometime in the June – September time window would be really hot on the heels of the white iPhone 4 release.
Not that I’m certain Apple won’t do it anyway, but why would they go to the considerable trouble of ramping up white iPhone 4 production and channel distribution only to replace it with a new model in just a couple or three months’ time? Doing so just to wring a few more sales out of a lame duck iPhone 4 seems pretty cynical, and Apple is usually a classier act than that. Which is another reason why I think an iPhone “4S” upgrade with an A5 processor and perhaps an 8 megapixel camera seems more likely in the near term, with the iPhone 5 release held off until late fall or even 2012.
On Monday, Chris Chang of the Chinese Apple-oriented site M.I.C. Gadget posted an image of a white iPhone with a larger display than depictions of the white iPhone 4 have shown, which he says my be someone’s mockup…. or….”prototype iPhone with an A5 processor that game developers are using to prepare their iPhone 5 apps.” Interesting, but nothing conclusive there. Still mostly rumors and conjecture, but the white iPhone 4 at least should be reality by the end of the week.
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