'Leaked' iPhone 6 pics will make cool fanbois WEEP - it's a PHABLET The days of 2014 haven’t even clocked up double figures yet and already the iPhone 6 rumour mill is grinding out more purported sightings of Apple’s next iOS handset design. This time we get to gaze upon blurry metal chassis images, apparently courtesy of Chinese site CTech, (C科技). Yet following this supposed leak, all and …
You mean Voice calls? LOL - so 2003. My even-cooler-than-me teenage son doesn't even have any voice calling included on his cheep-as-chips PAYG plan. SMS and a wee bit of data is all. I make hardly any voice calls at all, and those few are just to find my wee feisty wife hiding behind the clothes racks at the mall. Voice calls - puh.
if it "came with" ???
Since when does the fruity firm GIVE anything away? If it was indeed an apple i device, and did make it to market as a phab, you can bet your ass that the base unit will allow hand held calls, and an official, white BT adapter will be available for 3 times the market price of other BT headsets...
Once again, a snarky comment by some fanboi that needs to justify his product choice, good or bad, by running down the competition.
I own devices from all three major mobile OS concerns, Google, Microsoft and Apple. Seems to me that none of them give you much extra when you buy the product. Accessories that not everyone wants would only add to the cost.
Weren't these already disproved yesterday? All the features on these photos resemble the pre-iPhone5 design.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/01/08/iphone-6-frame-photos/
- The part appears to be a midframe such as that found in earlier iPhone models, allowing components to be attached to both sides of the part before being enclosed in the device's shell. Apple did away with midframe components as of the iPhone 5, opting for a unibody rear shell design that allows components to be mounted directly to the shell, yielding a thinner design. A return to a design requiring a midframe part would seem unlikely given Apple's emphasis on thinness.
- The frame seems to show accommodation for a headphone jack at the same end of the device where a circular feature presumably corresponding to the device's rear camera is positioned, undoubtedly the top end. With the shift to the narrower Lightning connector in the iPhone 5, Apple shifted the location of the iPhone's headphone jack to the bottom edge of the device, matching the position seen on the iPod touch since its launch and allowing the headphone cable to naturally fall so as to not interfere with viewing of the device's screen. Moving the headphone jack back to the top edge of the device for the iPhone 6 appears unlikely, though not impossible.
In the face of those apparent inconsistencies with Apple's design direction, there is essentially no evidence in favor of this part being from an iPhone, leaving only the original poster's claim as support. The part is rather unremarkable with what appears to be fairly poor finish quality, meaning that it could be from one of any number of devices in the Asian supply chain.
I don't think they have consistent design direction.
but the point about the lightening connector makes sense, no?
they moved the headphone jack to the bottom because there is space there - it also means, if you put the phone in your trouser pocket while listening on head/earphones, the phone is upside down in your pocket - so when you reach in to take it out and look at it, it is the right way up in your hand.
that's the kind of weird attention to detail that Apple love. would seem odd for them to abandon in within one design iteration, no?
Except when you have it in your jacket pocket or shirt pocket or strapped to your arm when jogging or in a rear pocket when riding a bike, it is the wrong way up.
So, always wrong for someone or sometimes, or they need to have a socket at each end.
There is no 'right' end of the phone for the jack.
A wireless headset fixes this problem entirely for me.
While most of us would feel that we'd look a bit daft holding a phablet-like device to our ear to make a call, I reckon the fanbois will lap this up....another way to draw attention to themselves and the fact that they have the latest iDevice.
[ fact - based on professional experience in this area - the iPhone has the biggest ratio of perceived market presence to actual market presence. Android, BB, etc, users have a "smartphone" and say things like "I need to make a call" or "I'll look that up on my phone".....Apple fanbois have "and iPhone" and say "I'll need to make a call on my iPhone" or "I'll get my iPhone and look that up". Consequently, there's a perception that there are a lot more iPhone users out there than there actually are, just because they keep banging on about the iPhone so much, whereas users of other platforms just get on with it ]
> the OP knows it to be true based on their experience, so in essence it is a fact to them
Truthiness is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
I don't see this as a I* device _user-based_ phenomenon, but rather an example of some extremely good marketing by Apple: iPhone (and iPad, and iPod) are all extremely good monikers for the device, better than "smartphone" ("tablet", "MP3 player").
This should come as no surprise, because by and large Apple's strength is in "technical marketing", rather than true pure innovation: to paraphrase BASF, they didn't invent the mouse/MP3 player/smartphone/tablet/whatever, they packaged up a bunch of existing stuff (and did very well), and then SOLD it to consumers.
I respectfully disagree. I may be a part of a small minority who never ever did that, but the claim that idevice users being obsessed with telling people what devices they have can be easily applied to Samsung Galaxy owners, just to give an example. I've heard my friend say, "Let me see that video on my Galaxy". Which kind of puzzled me because, why don't you just say "my phone"? Seriously, I think I've not come across any apple or droid users addressing their phones as "my iphone" or "my droid".
Makes it very annoying to read otherwise entertaining novels (I am looking at you Patricia Cornwell) that constantly say "I sent a quick email using my iPhone". The context invariably means she doesn't need to say how she sent the damn email. It particularly doesn't need to use 'iPhone' as one says 'Hoover', it hasn't earned that right and never will.
Just off to Philishave...
"I sent a quick email using my iPhone"
It's called creative writing... Lots of detail, even if irrelevant, helps paint a more vivid mental picture.
The assasin drove up slowly in the black Audi, its tyres crunching the gravel..." Black, Audi and crunching gravel sound are all irrelevant.
Will it have more than 64Gb of storage?
I'm using a (now) suffering 64Gb. I also use my phone as my ipod and if they released a phone one with at least 80Gb then I wouldn't have to downgrade all of my music just to get it onto the phone*. Not usually a problem but syncing has become really flaky lately, I have to resync the whole phone generally once a month. It takes all night as the music files get re-encoded before being sent to the phone.
I know this is more a problem with iTunes 11, iOS7 and crapy syncing with the iPhone but I'd still rather just have a phone big enough to store everything. I'm happy with sticking to iPhones, although I see little need to upgrade at the moment. In any case Android seem to be keeping the rivals I might consider (Nexus) with limited storage as they'd rather have people use the cloud for everything but in the real world we move around where bandwidth and effective bandwidth rarely enable such activities.
And while we are at it get rid of that connector - either 30pin (the one everyone has a dock for) or the proper standard micro-USB.
* - The reason is that I keep all my music (ripped from CDs) in lossless, not because I think I can hear the difference between that and 192Kbps but because I don't see any reason to rip CDs into lossy formats. Disc space isn't a premium so why choose a lower quality format for the source? I'd rather have the equipment limit the sound quality rather than the data itself and I don't have to worry about reencoding, with lossless I have a music collection that I can keep forever without re-ripping and re-encoding fine if needs be.
Funny when you mention that disk space isn't a premium while complaining that you are suffering from 64Gb.
Yes, I did think that when writing but hoped people would understand I meant that hard disc space (computers and stuff) doesn't have a storage premium but storage on the phone is very limited. It is also why I don't fully understand why phones have not increased in capacity much over the last few years, I would have thought it would be a simple headline improvement for manufacturers in competition.
At the risk of upsetting Your Majesty I'd argue there's nothing 'funny' about The Don's situation. Perfectly acceptable to comment that disk space isn't a premium if you rip your CDs into a library stored on a PC/Mac with its gig upon gig of disk space and then sync to a device with 64GB of non-disk-based storage.
"In any case Android seem to be keeping the rivals I might consider (Nexus) with limited storage"
Not quite. Some Android devices do have a micro SD slot, you know. They come with quite astonishing capacity these days, considering how tiny they are, and you can remove/replace it, if it's still not enough. Of course, Apple lovers wouldn't know about it, because they have been limited to what Apple gave them for a long time. :P
Not quite. Some Android devices do have a micro SD slot, you know.
I know some Androids come with SD slots, but I did qualify my point by saying those 'I might consider', the Nexus line in particular don't. I would mainly consider jumping from an iPhone to a Nexus phone but they have very limited storage.
The fact that SD cards (and almost every other storage medium) store so much is why I'm perplexed that phones have stopped increasing in capacity.
"The fact that SD cards (and almost every other storage medium) store so much is why I'm perplexed that phones have stopped increasing in capacity."
The flash storage on phones is more like an SSD than the slow, fragile flash you get on SD cards. Different design, manufacturing processes, etc. Notice that the price per GB of SSDs has not fallen at nearly the same rate as SD cards. The original base model iPhone came with 4GB of flash. The current base model has 16GB. That's four times as much for the same price in just 6 years, roughly in line with the drop in SSD prices, or actually probably a little better.
As for storing all your audio on your phone, I think that's kind of an arbitrary goal, that you're only concerned with since current technology almost makes that possible/convenient. Flash forward 20 years and people with your mindset will instead be complaining that they can't store their entire movie collections on their phones--you might think such a complaint is ridiculous but I think it's pretty analogous. How about you just be happy with what you ARE able to store conveniently?
Also, iOS users aren't limited to iTunes to play music. Amazon has an excellent music app and service that lets you stream your entire music collection from the cloud no problem, and caches a user-configurable amount of it locally if you are concerned about using your "data minutes."
Usually I don't but basically every few weeks (after iOS7 of course) the sync messes up losing the music on the phone and I have to then resync the music onto the phone. This means a reenode (which iTunes does automatically) as the files are passed from computer to phone and this takes ages. I have thought of trying to have different collections but I ultimately just want simplicity. Music stored in one form and synced to the phone. My gripe is that the max storage in iPhones has plateaued since the 4S, an increase in storage would make life just a little bit simpler.
@Don Dumb
What you need is a thing called a "hard drive". They come in varying shapes and sizes.
I get the whole "i've made a backup of my music collection" I really do, but why on earth would you want to carry every single bit and byte of it around with you everywhere?
At what point are you in a situation where 5,10,20 or even 30 gigs of music in your pocket has been insufficient?
It's like buying a motorbike the bitching that there's no room for the wife, kids and golf clubs.
If this is your only form of backing this data up then that's foolish. Phones can be pretty fragile beasts, but lets assume you're not a simpleton and you have them on another hard drive then it's back to my original question;
Why on earth would you see "being able to carry over XXGb of music" ever be the primary concern when buying a smartphone?
@DijitulSupport- What the hell are you on about?
"I get the whole "i've made a backup of my music collection" I really do"
No you don't because that isn't what I'm doing, it is nothing to do with backup, where did you even get that idea? I have my music originally stored on my computer and also wish it to be listened to where I am, hence on my phone. Why would you even think I'm talking about backup when I said nothing of the sort.
Why on earth would you see "being able to carry over XXGb of music" ever be the primary concern when buying a smartphone?
Firstly I didn't say it was a primary concern but why wouldn't storage be a factor with a *smart*phone (aka computer phone). If you were just making calls with your phone, you wouldn't need a smartphone at all. I happen to want the same music I own on my phone as it doubles as my iPod.
> Why on earth would you see "being able to carry over XXGb of music" ever be the primary concern when buying a smartphone?
Possibly because he is demonstrating the point made by ' The Man Himself' above. The most important aspect about owning a phone is 'street cred'. Being able, not only to say "I have an iPhone", but also "I have more music than the rest of you put together" is vital in his social clique (The Cult of Jobs).
Or perhaps because I have better ways to spend my time than trying to predict which music I might want to listen to in the next week/month/whenever. It probably doesn't matter whether you copy a subset to an iPhone, or to a memory card, it'd just be convenient to fit the whole lot in one and not have to spend time choosing.
I too carry my entire collection of music on my iPhone. That's around 150GB as Apple lossless on my PC and around 35GB as AAC on my phone. I really want a 128GB or even larger capacity on my phone, and specifically did not upgrade to th e5S for this very reason.
Is your lossless FLAC?, if not, you have a solution.
Btw, iPhones have lousy audio stages, as do iPods (and other phones).
The fact is that your audio equipment is not good enough to warrant lossless storage. The dynamic range is too low and the quality of the amplification is too poor - they spend a tiny amount of the BOM on that stuff.
You may well be able to get a better result if you use Bluetooth A2DP, using a high data rate to a very expensive pair of headphones with very expensive audio stages.
This all presumes you actually have the listening equipment) able to tell and/or you have a graphic equaliser on your phone to help out your useless ears - mine does, for wired headsets at least.
I couldn't help laughing when a colleague bemoaned the storage on his HTC (of some previous non-Beats vintage) because FLAC took up too much space (so he simply selected subsets of his music). When I mentioned the above issues with the audio stages and the mismatch (both impedance and audio quality wise) with his expensive Sennheiser headphones, his response was that he needed to start out with the highest quality to get the best possible output.
I have a high confidence that testing, say, 320kps MP3 against FLAC would not have been discernible on that equipment with those ears.
@cambsukguy - I don't think you bothered to fully read my comment.
I know I can't hear the difference between lossless (in this case Apple Lossless) and a decent lossy bitrate, especially when played back through a phone. The lossless music on my computer is reencoded to a lossy bitrate (by iTunes) when synced to my phone. I'd just rather have a bit more storage and not even bother needing to convert, just have everything in lossless and keep it simple.
I have a vague recollection that at least one oldish iphone or ipod was rated relatively highly by the people on HeadFi (headphone audiophile obsessives). Not newer ones though. I have a FiiO portable headphone amp/DAC thing which I often attach to an iPhone 3GS - the difference between lossless and AAC is very noticeable through the headphone amp but close to undetectable using the phone output (with Sennheiser HD25 headphones).
"Btw, iPhones have lousy audio stages, as do iPods (and other phones)."
I don't know what you mean by audio stage but I assume you mean its DAC. In fact, iPhones have excellent audio hardware. In fact, better than a lot of dedicated audio hardware:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/iphone-5/audio-quality.htm
I know how cool and trendy it is to slag off Apple kit but the fact is that a lot of their stuff is really excellent.
The luddite training has worked quite well but progressives are battering at the door.
Following late as possible is good for Apple if there is enough user hang on.
The fanboy effect created a wise marketing motto of 'I don't want never gets' .
Every couple of months an article will mention 'peak Apple'. It rather devalues the phrase if it needs to be re-hashed so often.
It rather reminds me of a broken clock — it will be right twice a day.
Eventually you will be right with 'peak Apple' and even then, you won't know until much later afterwards.
In the meantime it's getting very tedious.
didn't you know thats the way of the world in the New Reg.
Find a phrase and use it to the absolute death, and pretend its still very clever and everyone is still laughing.
eg: fruity firm, foxconn rebrander.
to someone who has never been on the site before it generates a chuckle, for the rest of us its like hearing the senile old man tell the same hero war story *again*
i really miss the old days of El Reg
>Every couple of months an article will mention 'peak Apple'. It rather devalues the phrase if it needs to be re-hashed so often.
Not really. Peak Apple was the week of Sept 17th last year - stock is now back where is was 12 months ago and the best case scenario is it will decline gradually throughout the year.
Samsungs next Note, the Note 4 is said to come in normal and 'pro' versions, the later possibly having an aluminium casing...
As for not looking 'cool' when taking a call on a 'phablet'. If looking cool is an issue to you then you have issues. I couldn't give a toss what I look like using my Note II... It's those wearing all the shades of beats headphones and their trousers around the bottom of their arse I laugh at... :)
Ok, as the title says this might be my next phone should it come to fruition.
The reason I'm still using a 4S is that the 5 and 5s offer no real improvement in terms of screen real estate. Sure it's bigger, but it's not that much bigger and it's bigger in the wrong way, at least for my purposes.
At the moment I'm packing a 4S in conjunction with an iPad mini. I would really like to consolidate these devices into one and if Apple is going to offer a phablet then I'm in. I already look like a prick carrying two Apple devices so I can't imagine an Apple phablet will make me look more of a prick, who cares if it does anyway.
That said, the biggest problem could be that a phablet is a poor phone because it's not as easily pocketable, and a poor tablet as it lacks the screen size to get anything really useful done. I dunno, I'll consider my prickdom as and when such a device exists
I really hope Apple never caves into the pressure from this echo chamber of "analysts" and internet forum posters to make their phone screens bigger. It will be a disappointing day if they do.
I have owned iPhones and Android phones with bigger screens. I find the iPhones markedly easier to hold and use. I usually hold my phone in my left palm. The iPhone is thin enough that I can do this and still conveniently touch anywhere on the screen with my left thumb, so I can easily type with both hands, etc. My Android phones have been too wide for me to do this conveniently. I also find the smaller iPhone more comfortable to carry in my pocket, and it fits perfectly in the center console of my car.
I don't even know what user benefit a bigger screen is supposed to give me. If I'm having trouble seeing something on my iPhone because it's too small, I move the phone closer to my eyes, and presto! It's like having a bigger screen. When I switched from Android back to iPhone, I didn't miss the bigger screens for a second. In fact, I had a strong feeling that the iPhone was more advanced, since electronics generally progress in the direction of smaller, thinner, lighter, etc.
A Fanboi writes:
Jeez I hope it is faked: the 5S is about as large a phone as I want: it still fits in one of the inside pockets on my suits and also fits in my jeans pockets.
If I want a larger screen, there's my iPad Mini. Anything larger and there's the iPad or the MacBook and any real work can be done on the iMac.
Phablets? No: they're for those female types or the impoverished*...
*that's a joke, BTW
Looking at Samsung Note 3 sales numbers (15 Millions in one quarter) versus Apple iPhone sales (34M in the September quarter before the launch of the 5S and 5C) Apple would be nuts not to release a Phablet.
It doesn't fit everyone's requirement (I wouldn't want to carry a manbag so that I can put a phablet in it) but as long as one can still get a reasonably sized device (call it 4.3-4.7 inch) what's the problem?
This could actually bring the Apple line up close to the 50 Millions sales in small quarters and around 65 Millions in the last quarter of the year.
Great news if you're a bean counter.
Coming from iPhone obsessed Hipsterville (not Eastbourne) I was really surprised to see so many chicks with big android mobiles in Singapore. One of the local owners explained to me that the females out there are addicted to Korean TV soaps which they love to watch on their mobiles on public transport, and that those discrete iPhones were no good (I guess they are subtitled or something).
Returning to the pics, I doubt the images are genuine, but I doubt the Apple Genies would want to exclude potential iTunes customers because they failed to adapt to a different market.
Does anyone read comments this far down?
If this is a prototype, would it be in china?
I'm sure I saw a documentary where sir Johnny was standing in front of a bank of MASSIVE 3d printers knowing out prototype cases for iPads and the new (at the time) iMac - I know they don't mass produce in america, but surely the prototyping stages are done there?
This is a genuine question - I really don't know - does anyone have an answer?
Back in early 2007 people took the piss out of the size of my 5" HTC Athena. Most people thought it odd to want to be able to check emails or surf on a phone. Tastes change.
If apple do release a phablet then 2014 will be the year that Apple fanbois tech editors, such as Charles Arthur at the guardian, tell us that phablets are clearly superior to tiny 4-5" phones.
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