Something doesn't seem right...
/Tomorrow's the big day, when the next iPhone (which I still say makes no sense to call iPhone 5, no matter how well it jives with the graphic above) is announced. 1PM tomorrow EST. I watch these liveblogs at The Verge and at Ars Technica. They're both excellent and rock solid through the massive traffic.
I recently watched this hands-on by The Verge who got ahold of a purported mockup of the sixth gen iPhone. This hardware mockup is the sum total of all the rumors and supposed hardware leaks of the new device, finally all pieced together. If you haven't been following these leaks that have been showing up for the past few moths, give the video a watch since they go through all the suspected hardware changes. The generally agreed upon deltas between the iPhone 4S and the sixth generation device are:
- 16:9 aspect ratio screen that is tall enough to support an additional row of icons on the home screen
- Miniaturized dock connector
- Headphone jack moved to bottom of the device from the top
- Two-tone metal back
- LTE
- Thinner
And notably absent: NFC. Gruber, Dalrymple, and Anandtech can't all be wrong. It's too bad, since I think getting NFC in iPhone would be game changing, especially with the new iOS 6 feature, Passbook. Womp.
I'm not sure what it was about this particular video that spurred the thought, but something about these leaks just doesn't seem to add up. It seems that every single piece of this thing has already leaked out, which has never happened before. What if this is a bogus leak by Apple? I'm not sure, but something doesn't seem right.
If this is indeed legitimate, some other feature has to be missing. I don't think this is enough of a redesign. There has to be some big hardware feature that didn't leak, and I feel like the leaks we've been seeing could not be this device at all. We'll have to wait and see. For a full roundup of the rumors, check out this great post. For the real deal, tune in at 1PM tomorrow.
I'm still holding out hope they don't call this thing iPhone 5. Do right by me Apple.
