iPhone 5/4S Announcement on Oct 4th

By Alex Angove

Last updated 28 September 2011

Apple’s finally given the world an announcement date for its next iPhone launch event. On October 4^th all rumours will be laid to rest and bloggers the world over can take a deep, relaxed breath once we finally get to clear up all the hearsay and find out the facts about the next iteration of iPhone.

Of course there’s no way of knowing just what Apple will be announcing. Will it be the iPhone 5? Will it be the iPhone 4S? iPhone 4G? Will it be some kind of mixture of the three? Will Apple announce two phones or just one? These things we have no way of knowing until the actual announcement, so for each possibility we’ve listed a few of our thoughts and hopes.

The iPhone 5

A new physical design, possibly with an aluminium back-plate. Very thin, not amazingly light and, most of all, a larger screen. We don’t think that Apple will actually have changed the overall physical size of the iPhone 5 too much, but there’s a lot of potential real-estate that’s not being used on the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. There have also probably been more rumours surrounding the screen size of the iPhone 5 than any of its other components.
Apple could possibly ditch the physical Home button. Apple has already demonstrated some new multi-touch commands that involve 4 fingers or more that remove the need for a Home button. We wouldn’t be surprised to see these implemented on the iPhone 5 and the extra phone real-estate utilised to increase the height of the display.
Immediately available in both Black and White.
8MP rear camera or better with at least a 1.3MP front-facing camera.
Dual-core processor of at least 1.2GHz worth of power.
1GB of RAM or more.
There have been many rumours of 4G LTE support. We wouldn’t be surprised if these turned out to be true, but we’re not putting any money on it, either. LTE is simply not wide-spread enough outside the US at the moment. It’s very possible Apple has chosen to wait until the next iPhone to include this service.
A release-date of sometime around mid-October in the US, which we’ve been saying for a while now so it would be nice to be proven correct.
iOS5 and iCloud support straight out of the box.
Both CDMA and GSM support in just one device. This isn’t an important feature for customers outside the US, but it should make things easier for American customers, especially when it comes to stock availability around launch time.
16GB – 32GB of memory.

The iPhone 4S

Similar physical design to the iPhone 4 or, at least, a form factor that is not particularly off-track for Apple products.
A low power dual-core CPU (around 1GHz) or possibly a high power single-core CPU (around 1.5GHz)
An 8MP rear camera and no improvement on the current front-facing camera.
Immediately available in both Black and White.
iOS5 and iCloud support out of the box.
Around 8GB of memory if the iPhone 5 is announced, or 16GB if the iPhone 5 is not announced.
No 4G LTE support.
The same 3.5 inch screen we saw on the iPhone 4.

Obviously we hope to see both these rumoured devices make an appearance at the October 4^th Apple event, but there’s no way to know for sure until the show kicks off. We’ll definitely keep you updated as more info starts to leak out, so stay tuned to this space.