Report: 3G iPhone 22% thinner, better battery life - Page 2

And when you see it, you're going to buy it.

I'd be very, very afraid if I were RIM. This may mark the beginning of the end (albeit a slow decline toward dead) for the Crapberry.

I'm very mobile and usually don't have access to AC wall or DC lighter sockets long enough to warrant plugging it in. It serves its purpose well enough, but I could use a few more hours and/or a brighter screen. But it's not everyday that I'm out for that long, but when I am it's good to know I can go for 8 hours.

I think this is quite plausible. You're missing a few important points:

- the new phone is going to have better integration, so less chips, more room. Same with the screen.

- the computer industry keeps on moving forward, that means better power consumption, smaller size. Last years model probably used 90nm predominately, this one probably uses 65nm.

- Apple have had more time to improve the physical (antenna, case) design which would yield more space. The fact that an all plastic back is rumoured is very telling.

- improved battery time will very likely not refer to 3G, but to 2G, with GS turned off, etc (comapring apples to apples so to speak)

This rumour sounds very sensible and very much like Apple. More memory, thinner with more features. GPS is a no brainer, it's a very popular feature. I'm willing to believe it all.

"What? An adding machine that'll fit in your pocket? Yeah, right."

"What? A telephone that doesn't have to sit on the end table and will fit it my pocket? Yeah, right."

3G AND better battery life?!

Do those Apple engineers ever sleep?

T-mobile! T-mobile! T-mobile!

You've missed the point. As an established journalist on Apple, Leander depends on the integrity of facts, not rumors. His product is credibility and insight--why would he risk this in an arena that is saturated enough with rumors? As for analysts, they will profit no matter what they spew.

Dunno, you'd have to ask him why he's doing it... but doing it he is. He is publishing speculation and rumor, and nothing more.

I kind of have to ask why you care so much to start a new account on his behalf.

Thinner, more battery life, 3G and GPS. Pick only TWO of the three.

I'm skeptical. They released the old one less than a year ago. In a year, they've supposedly added 3G, GPS, quadrupled the RAM and it's a quarter thinner - yet the battery life has increased?

If true, I'd be ecstatic. I just don't believe it.

http://www.fiercecio.com/techwatch/s...dma/2007-05-23

Why would a programmer know about the form factor? Even the Apple iPhone programmers didn't know what the 1G would look like. Silly.

A lot of what you wrote is not from an understanding of the original technology, but in case you haven't pulled it apart, or in case you didn't read my post, the screen can't be reduced by much at all, it is quite compact as is.

Less chips? Adding GPS adds a chip (count them, there aren't many there and they are tiny as they are. Unless they stop existing, it still doesn't account)

better battery at 2G mode? Of course it will - efficiency increases. To state it straight out about the 3G iphone assumes that 3G is accounted for or its just another iPhone. If 2G of course it will be better battery time, even with the same size battery.

3G though? Battery time will drop, or at the best stay around the same.

8 hours is pretty out of reach for the iPhone I believe at this stage. The 3GOLD chipset isn't that good on power yet.

So you pulled it apart and now you're a state of the art touchscreen engineer? Best you leave it to the professionals.

As far as your idea on the limitation of chip counts, until there is only one chip in the iPhone, I won't be saying they've gone as far as they can. And chip sizes are largely determined by the number of pins (or balls these days) it has, as chips are combined there is need for less of them since the communication is internal, and the size drops.

I know that a popular maker of Bluetooth chips, CSR, have produced a combination GPS/Bluetooth chip, so GPS need not increase the chip count.

I don't think 2G talk time will increase mostly because of efficiency, but because it'll have a bigger battery. 3G battery life will always be worse (for the foreseeable future at least) but anyone who cares about talk time doesn't walk around in 3G mode anyway.

Subsidies? Say hello to the new razr.

It would only make the stock drop when revealed to be false if the stock rose on the hopes of it being true. Net result is zero.

One of the ways to tell if a rumor is true or not is to ask, Does this use technology that exists today? People frequently forget this when it comes to Apple products. Back when the MacBook Air was still a rumor people were speculating that it would contain an SSD drive at a capacity that was unavailable and a price that was impossibly low. Afterwards they all expressed disappointment that Apple hadn't set up its own factory for creating magical non-existent 256gb SSD drives at prices 10 times below their competitors 64gb drives. With this in mind I find it highly unlikely that Apple has a 3G phone that gets better battery life than its current phone. 3G phones have notoriously bad battery life. Apple doesn't do research on batteries and doesn't make batteries and better power management is never going to give you that kind of battery life.

1. Even established journalists get it very, very wrong. Heck, O'Grady swore up and down that Apple was going to be releasing HDTVs for the living room awhile back, and even the NYT sometimes publishes this drivel. (Heck, I've heard Rob Enderle speak on the subject on NPR, so even very respectable news sources can sometimes be very misguided.)

2. Wired is hardly a credible news source. They're the geek equivalent of Cosmo. I learned the hard way how they're basically willing to sell their credibility completely away just to sell a few extra copies of a magazine when they had an "in-depth" article that in part discussed my software. (It was a complete fabrication in which the very few things that were accurate were carefully taken out of context to support his hypothesis. And this was about deployed software.)

3. Nobody knows. Everyone's got sources, and the sources have sources. And Apple likes misinformation. Wired probably doesn't have any better sources than c|net or AppleInsider.

Is it just me, or does anyone else count four?

If the programmer was doing testing on the final product.

He forgot to mention teleporting capabilities!!

I guess I will just stop readying anything about the 3G iPhone until Monday.

I think you've confused a multi-decade technology shift for one that happens in a single year. There's a lot of new features rumored, many of them more power consuming in general, and supposedly it's all going to get into a tinier package than the previous year's model.

It's possible, but I too am holding out the idea that it may also be an attempt at stock manipulation. Even if it's illegal, prosecution is pretty rare.

Not a whole lot of computers support all day internet use on a battery.


Keep in mind that Steve saying something doesn't mean it's the concern that truly caused the feature to be dropped.

We always do this to ourselves...build things up to a frenzy only to be disappointed when nothing like this ever pans out. I can't recall any upgrade that has met or surpassed expectations.

My guess is 3G and a tapered form factor. I'll go as far as saying there won't even be GPS included.
Aim low so you'll be pleasantly surprised.

I'm only expecting iPhone2 (maybe not even that) and iPod Touch demo with some cool apps. If they hand out stickers, so much the better.

THANK YOU!!! Apple prolly hates all these rumors! But they love us talking about this and getting excited.

Apple's history is to offer more functionality at the same price point in subsequent models -- see especially the history of iPod price to functionality and specs ratio over the years. So maybe $399 with a $499 BTO 32GB. I can't see $549 for the base main model.

The $299 sounds about right though -- for a "little iDevice for all of us" -- and it might be allowed to be subsidized to $200 as reports have suggested -- which would bring several rumors together.

Apple's admitted that their not married to any business model. The exclusive contract probably refers to revenue sharing. I'm sure Apple could (and might) decide to break the exclusive contract in exchange for loss of profit sharing of data plans.


Working with Verizon would mean a separate CDMA version. I don't foresee that happening. Eventually GSM phones will work on Verizon as Verizon has said they will open up their network.

Something that is being overlooked is that when thne 1 was in R&D, very few within Apple knew that it was in development. You had the phone people and the multitouch iTablet people working on the same device. So, I'm pretty sure that the iPhone 2 will be the ideal iPhone that Jobs wanted to deliver. I'm sure Apple will once again blow us away when he shows us the new and improved iPhone. So yes, I believe that the new iPhone will deliver longer battery life, being from better battery or from power management within the OS. And I do believe that we will see a thinner, 3G, GPS, revamped iPhone come monday.

Also, a little off topic,but with two icon app slots available on the iPhone. What kindof fun apps do you guys think Santa Steve will give us?

Are you referring to the Home Screen? I believe you can currently have up to 8 home screens. SInce you can put bookmarks on the Home Screens and the App Store will allow you to install many apps I don't expect anythign but he App Store icon to be on there.

First of all, If the claims of better battery life is true, Then I'd surely bet that there will be an asterisk next to the claim that points out that the stated battery life is measured with WIFI, GPS, Forward-facing cam, and potentially even UMTS/3G disabled.

But at the same time, a lighter/thinner 3G iPhone with better battery life is not necessarily wishful thinking. With regards to hardware improvements, people need to remember how fast integrated-circuit technology moves, particularly in microprocessors, embedded systems, telecommunications, etc. Since the first iPhone's parts were sourced, embedded chip manufacturers have moved to smaller processing nodes, with many chips going from 110/90nm down to 55nm/65nm. This leads to smaller die sizes and better power efficiency.

There are also always continuing advancements in chip integration and optimization. For communications, Maybe iPhone 3G has a special SoC ARM processor that not only is more power efficient from a die-shrink, but has improved architecture and algorithms. Maybe the iPhone 3G uses an advanced baseband chip that is smaller, yet includes UMTS, WiFi, and GPS all on one chip and thereby saves significant physical space which and allows the iPhone to be thinner, but have a larger battery at the same time. All I'm saying is that most of us don't know enough to be able to accurately predict whether they can pull this off the type of improvements in the rumor or not. We need an experienced mobile phone/embedded systems engineer to comment on recent developments in this technology area.

One final thing to think about is that Apple probably didn't use the smallest/most power efficient/most modern components available, so as to save some headroom for iPhone v2 improvements (and reduce costs).

Is that a joke? Why would Apple risk doing that. You cant even buy iphone in the UK any more. Absolute rubbish.

But do you have an opinion of your own on the matter?

Because that would make too much sense like copy and paste and a flash on the rear camera. Apple doesn't like making sense.

Ouch! Take a chill pill.

You win the thread!

I agree with your prediction.

That's funny - just a week or so ago, there was a rumor of OVERSUPPLY of these chips - and the analyst blamed reduced Apple usage. Hint: Don't believe rumors.




Since when has factual integrity been the hallmark of journalism? OK, maybe back in the 60's, but for the last 20 years, 'journalism' has been all about hype, FUD, and building mountains out of molehills.


Apple often distributes beta units for programmers. They didn't do it with iPhone 1.0 because there were no authorized outside programmers. Since one of the features of iPhone 2.0 is the ability to have third party programs, it wouldn't surprise me to have some in the hands of programmers.

It's possible I'd guess. Likely, no. Leander has been known to be a bit away with the fairies at times quoting unqualified rumours.

Here's why I think it's possible and purely my take on what I've read over the last year...

iPhone v1 was more a stick in the sand design. All the parts were pretty much off the shelf and v1 was split between two boards - one 'logic', one comms. I'd guess that they could just switch out the comms board for a 3G comms board and be done with v2 but that wouldn't give them thinner and better battery, and Steve likes thinner.

If they've been doing their work in the last two to three years since the v1 design was probably finished, v2 will use more highly integrated chips, reducing the chip count and using better processes. The ARM SOC manufacturers are using 45nm now. Some of iPhone v1's ARM chips are on .13 microns! They've also got multiple CPUs in there that seem to be underused to me. The SGOLD3 chip on the comms board is pretty much a phone in itself with it's own ARM926 core and second ARM7 core but they've also got the main ARM CPU on the logic board. To me, the iPhone design still looks like an iPod Touch with a cheap EDGE phone board slapped on. It's surely inefficient in both space and power.

So, it's highly possible the board and chip design has got smaller/simpler yet adding features and requiring less power. That might give them room for a smaller battery and so thinner.

Out of left field, there's also that patent for solar charging a few weeks back with solar cells under the LCD display. Maybe they've added that, reduced the battery size and added a big asterisk that says 'when tested in sunny California' to the specs. I hope they don't as I'm in rainy Manchester.