3G iPhone rumor roundup

If you follow Apple news at all, for the last week or two you’ve been absolutely drowned by the tidal wave of rumors, information leaks and otherwise about the long-awaited 3G iPhone. My personal favorite website for following such things is MacRumors, just because I like the layout of their site and I can quickly hit up the home page for small stories that tell me what I need to know, but that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to get at here is that for a while everytime I’ve checked out MacRumors there’s been at least one or two new posts about information regarding a new iPhone, whether rumored or authentic. I’m honestly kind of tired of hearing about it, I mean at this point the 3G iPhone might as well be confirmed. I don’t need anymore evidence…I wish Apple would just put something on their homepage saying here’s the cost, here’s the specs, here’s what’s new and get it over with. The assumption though is that we’ll have to wait until WWDC (June 9th is Steve Jobs’ keynote) for confirmation. That being said I want to go over some of the rumors and such like ahead of time in this post.

Let’s start out with the big one – the iPhone is supposed to get 3G access. If you don’t know about 3G, it’s a much faster network than AT&T’s current Edge which the iPhone is limited to. In preparation for this article I’ve spent some time watching comparison videos of loading a website on Edge and loading the same website with 3G, and I have to say for the most part the difference isn’t mindblowing. For as big of a deal as people made about the first rev of the iPhone not having 3G you would think the difference would be substantial. After watching these videos I’m pretty content that, if I owned an iPhone, I would definitely prefer to use wifi even if I was able to use a 3G network. Of course the videos I’ve seen might just be representative of an area with bad 3G coverage and I’ve heard a lot of different opinions of 3G (some people saying it’s much faster than Edge, others saying the difference is negligible) so it’s not a guaranteed boost. Like I said, wifi still seems to run the show.

The biggest reason for 3G not being enabled for the first iPhone was that it’s notorious for devouring battery life. That’s a concern that most iPhone users have brought up – sure 3G is great but at what cost? If you can only use your phone for an hour what’s the point? That’s where the next rumor comes in – there’s a screenshot of an iPhone presumed to be one of the 3G enabled phones which has a toggle switch to turn 3G on/off. That means that you won’t be forced to use 3G when you don’t need it and you can save some battery life. Obviously to see the iPhone software referencing a 3G network also gives more evidence to back up the announcement in the first place. I think that’s a necessary feature, nothing really surprising or anything but like I said it gives more credence to the rumor.

Next up is the rumor which fulfills another highly requested feature – proper GPS. The iPhone has Google Maps which does a pretty decent job without actually having true GPS built into the device. The only problem of course is that the iPhone will only give you a rough estimate of your location instead of pinpointing it exactly, but for the most part I think it suffices. Well, another of the rumored upgrades to the iPhone is integrated GPS. That’s great, but again it’s another feature that will destroy battery life. At this point we’re at like a half an hour of battery life if you’re running both 3G and GPS simultaneously (I’m joking of course, but it makes you wonder). I hope they have a beefed up battery to go along with all these other upgrades – personally I think this one is kind of a bust. I can’t see them introducing both the 3G and the GPS at the same time, especially when I think Apple would like to maintain a healthy relationship with Google. Think about it, Google Maps, YouTube? Google Docs, Reader and Gmail all have to be pretty popular on the iPhone (especially after the SDK comes out and applications can be developed). Most importantly is the battery life though, and because the iPhone doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery (and therefore there’s no option to buy backup batteries) I can’t see it going down.

The next batch of rumors all have to do with the iPhone’s aesthetics – there has been a lot of information leaked from case manufacturers as far as dimensions go and it would seem that there are some subtle differences. Here’s a quote that basically details the changes:

Companies overseas have already started working on products for this one, which is basically the same size as the current iPhone, but has slightly different curves, coloration, and materials. Specs for either or both of these models could be nothing more than disinformation put out to burn developers, but they could also be correct.

Basically the rumored changes are that the phone’s back is now tapered slightly differently and has a bit of a slope to it instead of a nice rounded corner, and it’s supposed to be a bit thinner. Again, this kind of disproves the whole 3G+GPS deal, it’s hard for me to imagine that Apple could make the iPhone skinnier while adding all of those extras but who knows. There has also been a lot of information about new colors – from black and white to even red. There have been some pictures claiming to be the new 3G iPhone but it’s still unknown whether they’re official, fakes, or just pictures of upcoming iPhone cases.