We at Gizmodo do our very best to weed out the fakes and hoaxes from the real deal. Most of the time, we’re right, and we can pat ourselves on the shoulder and move onward. But what about the story of the hoax itself?
A few images of what is supposedly an iPhone 5 have leaked to the site Kit Guru.
Kit Guru claims that the photos were captured in Asia and are the real deal, but as Cult Of Mac points out, it’s likely a mockup made by a third-party case manufacturer.
Case manufacturers do their best to guess what new smartphones will look like so they can have cases ready for sale when the device launches. We saw this happen last year when everyone thought the iPhone 4S would have a brand new design. They were wrong.
But this design, which leaked a few months ago, seems to be the one everyone thinks will launch this fall.
Not only inside sources leak secret information to the press. Oftentimes companies themselves — and sometimes their partners — will unwittingly reveal secret product launches through their own digital slip-ups. On Monday, a bug in Apple’s iOS 6 beta revealed a major upcoming upgrade for Twitter’s iOS app. It was discovered only a day before Twitter’s official announcement, but still diminished what could have been a more sizzling product launch.
The whispers and smoke and noise about the rumored iPad mini—an iPad that would be 7.85-inches in screen size—are definitely getting louder. It’s by no means real yet, but the iPad mini could very well be an actual thing. But what would it look like? Tweeter TrojanKitten points out that unlike the twinsies nature of the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire, the iPad mini would house a different form factor from its 7-inch contemporaries, with a different sized screen.
AllThingsD is reporting that the next Kindle Fire will be thinner and lighter than the current Kindle Fire with a better display, boosting the pixels to a 1280 x 800 resolution. Supposedly, Amazon is targeting the second half of the year for the release—late in the third quarter, to be a little more specific.
AllThingsD also expects a camera to be added in the next Kindle Fire, which should help make more people look like hilarious fools for taking pictures with their tablets. The thing about a new 1280x800 screen though is that it changes the aspect ratio of the Kindle Fire from 1.71 to an aspect ratio of 1.60. The 1280x800 display is actually used in the Nexus 7 tablet so we could be looking at similar screens here.
Macotakara, a Japanese blog, cites a reliable source in China who claims to have seen a prototype of the iPad Mini and describes it as being slightly wider than Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet and about as thin as the fourth generation iPod touch.
The source also says that the new iPad model will have a 3G connectivity option, though not every provider that offers a wireless plan for the current iPad may offer one for the iPad Mini.
The Sunday Times is reporting that RIM is planning to split its handset and messaging network into two separate companies, then sell off the ill-fated BlackBerry hardware business.
As part of the move, the newspaper suggests that RIM would keep its messaging and data networks—including BBM, BIS, and BES—in-house, and then license them out to third parties. That’s a theory that’s been floated before, but never come to fruition.
The news comes on the back of a strategic review carried out by RIM in conjunction with RBC and JP Morgan. Though The Sunday Times does not explicitly cite any sources in its report, it does suggest that Facebook or Amazon may both prove to be “potential buyers” of the hardware wing.
Here is an interesting theory: the new dock connector in Apple’s new iPhone 2012 could be a 19-pin port that would be mechanically and electrically compatible with the micro-USB standard. I don’t know what it would be like, but I love the idea.
The theory is that Apple would have engineered this new dock connector in order to comply with the European Union directive to standardize chargers around micro-USB. This would make the iPhone compatible with the standard set by the European Standardisation Bodies CEN-CENELEC and ETSI, as well as by the Open Mobile Terminal Platform.
Microsoft’s hardware plans may be greater than just a tablet.
Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund drops this nugget in a note today:
Separately, our industry sources tell us that Microsoft may be working with a contract manufacturer to develop their own handset for Windows Phone 8. It is unclear to us whether this would be a reference platform or whether this may be a go-to market Microsoft branded handset. We would not be surprised if Microsoft were to decide to bring their own handset to market next year given that Microsoft has decided to bring to market their own Windows 8 ‘Surface’ tablet/PC products.
There are two reasons Microsoft might make its own hardware…
Take a look at these new artist renderings of what Apple’s next iPhone could look like.
We first spotted these amazing renderings over at Gizmodo.
The front sports a longer screen but does not look too different from the iPhone 4.
