iPhone 5 to be skinniest Apple yet SHOCK The next iPhone will be skinnier than the current one, but not entirely - as the Wall Street Journal would have us believe - because Apple will use advanced touchscreen tech. How does the paper know that's what Apple plans to do? The inevitable people familiar with what Apple is up to but who can't allow themselves to be named …
The new iPhone will be made of cheese. It will be 2" thick and come with a free case made of cream crackers. The connection will be updated, as the rumours correctly state, with the new iCelery connector - which will be a 1 pin parallel design, and require everyone to buy new peripherals.
As I remarked before, Apple used to claim that on its TV advertising, until someone else (Sony?) made a thinner one, and they had to replace the boast with something even more meaningless. I expect they're still smarting from that and want to be able to claim it again as a pointless but doubtless effective advertising gimmick.
.. you like Unix, and a good core dump does wonders.
I actually don't care much about the iPhone 5 - I tend to wait for the "S" versions which syncs nicely with my phone contract renewal. I've been on "S" releases since the 3GS (although I strayed once and also bought a HTC Wildfire S) :).
I personally don't WANT it bigger - Id get an iPad for that but I haven't found the need for it yet (laptop + Kindle works for me, YMMV)..
I see the marking garb already, "The thinnest and lightest iPhone yet" (... because we took off the pointless glass back that was weighing the last 2 down)
I know I'm baiting fanboys with this comment, but I hate the argument I hear often in favour of the iPhones design, "it weighs more so must be better", You carry a phone around all the time, less weight is good, I'd be glad to see Apple go for function over aesthetics.
I've heard that many times. I've also heard (and read countless times in forums) about how Samsungs are too light, so they must be crap. I agree with AC that portable devices shouldn't be given pointless additions that do nothing but add bulk and weight, and given Apple's thinner, lighter mantra with the Macbook Air, they seem to agree too.
"Still everyone will know you've got lots of money when you sit and play with it, which I suppose is the key point."
Really? iPhones are ten a penny. I'm not saying their bad but when any Tom, Dick and Harry can go out and get one they are hardly an indicator of success, taste or wealth
Unless of course you were being ironic, in which case I agree whole heartedly :)
Shockingly, my Galaxy S3 is not just much skinnier than my previous phone, surprisingly light, sturdier than I expected, but has excellent battery life, too.
I am half expecting to discover a downside like it attracts Elder Gods or something, right now, it is all too lovely..
Thinner would just make it harder to scoop-up in one hand, and easier to drop.
A return to a curved back like the iPad would help with handling.
The original iPad design had a flat back and Jobs called Ive in the night because he couldn't sleep and said, "You know what? The iPad is shit!"..."It's not endearing enough, you have to pick it up carefully with both hands"... "I wan't people to be able to just scoop it up in one hand without looking"...
Not having a flat back makes the thing a pain to use when rested on a flat surface.
I think Apple have got their forms the wrong way around: the 3GS was a much better design for a hand-held object than the 4/4S; while the 4's flat design better suits a tablet.
"Endearing" is an interesting choice of word for a style of design that strives to remove all evidence of emotion in its creation.
Before the fanbois start marching on that last comment, one of Dieter Rams's famed Ten Principles of Design is that "Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression." - and nobody with eyes would doubt the enormous influence of Rams in Apple's products (even the original iPhone calculator app looked like a Braun desk calculator).
I wish they could get over the obsessive compulsive disorder with thinness. I understand that the thinner it is, the lighter it usually is but really we are talking grams and fractions of grams. Has the human race became so weak armed that we can't support that extra gram in our hand. I mean a screen that will reduce the thickness of the phone by half a millimetre and an overall reduction in thickness by just over ONE MILLIMETRE. Well fuck me, I'm certainly going to notice the difference there. Personally I will just stick with my 4S, I know it's a chore having to lug that huge fucking breeze block of a phone around with me, but I'm sure I could invest in some sort of arm and wrist support accessory that will help me hold the hefty fucker to my ear.
Agreed that they probably want to make it thinner so it won't weigh any more than the current one if the new one has the rumored larger screen. Not that current phones weigh too much to hold in the hand as the smartass poster above you suggested, just that I've never heard anyone complain that a phone is "too light" so where they can shave off useless weight they probably should do so.
However I will take issue with your post and want to point out that making the phone bigger automatically INCREASES battery life because you have more room for a bigger battery. The bigger screen means the phone itself is bigger (unless you shrink the bezel so much that the phone stays the same size) Since you need the same electronics (CPU, memory, radio, etc.) whatever the screen size, 100% of the extra internal space opened up with the larger screen can be used for battery, which more than compensates for the additional power needed for a larger screen.
Thus if you have a larger screen you can either get more battery life OR make the phone thinner by targeting maintaining the same battery life. Apple seems to like thinnness, so that's probably the route they'll take, but they could surprise people by keeping the phone at the same thickness but have 50% more battery capacity.
Not sure which route I'd prefer if I was choosing. I, like most smartphone users, hook my phone up to a charger every night anyway and don't find current battery life to be a problem. On the other hand, I don't find myself wishing for a thinner phone either. I did prefer the rounded back of the 3GS as it seemed to fit in the hand more naturally than the flat back of the 4S, so maybe they could sacrifice the increased battery capacity by rounding the back like before. Others may feel differently...
as someone who barely avoided the Motorola brick as his first mobile phone (yes, I'm that old) and instead opted for the comparatively svelte NEC P3 I can assure you that weight matters to a degree. OTOH - you're right about those last grams. It leaves all these people so bereft of muscle tone they will have to grasp something else..
.. which gives them RSI ..
................these devices (and no, I am not just having a go at the iPhone) are thin and light enough. At the present state of the tech these obsessions come at the expense of other important elements - like having a decent sized battery in there just to mention one aspect. I am beginning to get arse-tired of hearing how light and how thin the latest offering is (regardless of which company we are talking about) when the net result is that the phones concerned often are not as good as they otherwise could have with regard to other criteria because they are being shoe-horned into ever smaller bodies (in the volumetric sense).
Apple shave a millimetre off the thickness of the phone to meet their design ethic.
Majority of buyers put their thin iPhone in a 3-4 millimetre thick sleeve to protect it.
Now whether Apple notice this or not - I guess not since most protectors are after market and bought from places like phone shops and Tesco and don't appear in Apple's sales records - they can still claim it as fantastically (fantastic - as in I can't believe they went to this much effort) thin.
Well, you may feel they are thin and light enough, but as people so far seem to keep buying phones that are thinner and mostly eschewing those that are fatter and heavier in exchange for a big battery (i.e. Droid Razr Maxx, which sold decently but is in a whole different world sales-wise compared to the various iPhone or Galaxy S models) I think the market is showing its disagreement with your personal preference.
>>My 4S lasts 3 days in use.
You have a magic one then, 14 hours in use (if you stick to 2G) or 40 hours if you use it as an iPod (and turn off the network), in theory you can get 200 hours out of it if you don't use it at all... kind of defeats the object really, reminds me of the Rowan Atkinson sketch where he starts a stopwatch, rips of in his car through back alleys, screehing tyres, across paths, through parks, through red lights, then drives onto the beach, stops his stopwatch and puts a sign in his guesthouse that says "less than 5 mins from the beach".
The point is, everybody I know with a "normal usage" of the iPhone 4/4S, an "urban cycle" if you like *has* to charge their phone every day, and some people charge their phone at work as well as night. My Xperia Play lasts 3+ days "in use" but it's got a 3600Mah battery and is about an inch thick and 4 hours of games on the train takes it down to a day (PS1 emulator).
Talking about the battery life of a phone is fairly pointless without mentioning cell network signal strength. I recently changed providers for my unlocked iPhone 4 and it took the battery life down from 2.5-3 days to closer to 1 day. Same exact phone, same usage patterns, I still get 3-4 "bars" of reported signal (usually 4), but battery life is massively reduced.
So it is frustrating to hear people complain about the iPhone's battery when I know it can be very good and they probably just have a poor network connection.
"Rowan Atkinson sketch where he starts a stopwatch, rips of in his car through back alleys, screehing tyres, across paths, through parks, through red lights, then drives onto the beach, stops his stopwatch and puts a sign in his guesthouse that says "less than 5 mins from the beach"."
.................I laughed out loud when I read your posting - its been years since I saw that one, I had quite forgotten it.
Until it's implantable and has an Haptic Holographic Interface, I'll be sticking with my current choice of iPhone 4s for music, contacts & photos sync'ed wirelessly via the Cloud and an Android for SatNav & web browsing.
Though shockingly, both are equally as good for touching a contact and actually talking to them....
I use my HTC on two networks with different SIM's.
One in the Uk where most of the time I'm 0.8km from the nearest tower Full 4 bars on the phone
One in the US where most of the time I'm 0.3km from the nearest GSM tower again 4 full bars on the phone
The US network drains the battery at a far greater rate than the UK one.
Where's the logic in that?
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