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Tue, 14 Apr 2009

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The silly season is upon us once again, and it's time for another round of predicting what product Apple plans next. Apple's cast-iron shroud of secrecy has prevented any leaks so far, although joining up the dots between known, and almost certainly known, facts reveals quite a lot about the iPhone 4G. Some are straightforward, but others point to a future for Apple's phone that is far from ordinary.

Of course, I'm mostly talking about the next iteration of iPhone, which for the sake of convenience I'm going to dub the iPhone 4G. Whether it ends up called this, or something more appropriate, remains to be seen.

The new iPhone is set to descend from the heavens and land among us mere mortals some time in June. WWDC is on 8 June and reports from China indicate that parts are ordered and production is taking place.

O2, meanwhile, has slashed £99 off the price of the iPhone giving it away for free (as long as you sign up to a lengthy 24 month contract). O2 also did this a couple of months before the iPhone 3G came out, reducing the original iPhone from £269 to £169.

But before we get to that, I'd like to run through some rumours:

1. That 3.2-megapixel camera
 Hans Wu of DigiTimes claims that Chinese manufacturer OmniVision has received bulk orders from Apple for a 3.2-megapixel CMOS image sensor. This would make sense. After all, the camera on the iPhone is widely regarded as sub-standard. But I'm not sure adding a 3.2-megapixel sensor will make that much difference. The key problem for me isn't the size of the shots, but the slowness of the shutter, lack of zoom, and absence of a flash. If Apple wants to turn the iPhone into a cameraphone these are all areas that need to be addressed.

2. Double vision The iPhone will feature a second camera on the front of the phone for video-conferencing? I'm less convinced by this rumour, but it might be just that I've never taken to video chat. Although I don't think I'm alone. Many smartphones had a camera on the front before the iPhone came out, and handheld video-conferencing is neither widely used nor a feature with much demand. Aside from that there's a cost factor here, video-conferencing is charged by the second and usually equates to around £2.50 per minute on most contracts. We don't see O2 absorbing that cost into the unlimited networking plan. So you'd be limited to video conferencing using WiFi only.

Mind you, the lack of an iChat app for the iPhone suggests that Apple is waiting for something. It's possible that Apple could include its patented technology that uses the screen itself as a camera, rather than building in a second camera.

3. A built-in magnetometer This is the interesting one. The inclusion of GPS in the iPhone 3G has transformed the Maps application. But it's still not great for navigation because you can't tell which way you're facing. However, the iPhone 3.0 beta apparently refers to a magnetometer. This tool is used to determine the absolute position a device is facing, both vertically and horizontally. This will make navigation by foot much easier.

4. Physical keyboard I don't think this is going to happen. When Apple developed the iPhone it put its flag in the ground marked multi-touch and virtual keyboards. Still, the rumour was there when the iPhone first came out and has never really gone away.

5. Up to 32GB storage This is more likely. The 16GB limit in the iPhone is because Apple can only fit in one 16GB NAND chip – it needs space for the transmitter. But Apple can fit two 16GB flash blocks in the iPod touch to make 32GB. It now turns out that Samsung has developed a 32GB NAND chip, so we expect to see a larger capacity iPhone. It could prove expensive though and I think the basic model will still be 8GB.

6. 802.11n wireless The inclusion of a >Broadcom BC4329 WiFi chip will take the iPhone from its current 802.11g capability to the faster, sleeker and thoroughly modern 802.11n. Speed is often cited as an advantage here, but it won't make much difference to browsing and email because the speed of 802.11g (54Mbps) is already far faster than most internet connections (which max out in the UK at a theoretical 20Mbps, but you're more likely to get between 2-8). So what's the point of 802.11n with its theoretical 600Mbps? On the Mac it makes file sharing faster, but the iPhone still uses the USB cable to sync. Maybe wireless syncing is on the way, but the concept of charging and syncing simultaneously is a usability strategy. Put simply the more you get used to wireless syncing, the more likely you are to find yourself running out of juice all the time. Still, there's a nice synergy here with the rest of the Mac set-up, and it means users can deploy 802.11n-only networks with longer range. Another bonus is that the 802.11n chip is reportedly less power hungry – although testing will tell.

7. Built-in FM This is one of the more far-out rumours. Apparently the Broadcom 802.11n WiFI chip that will be used in the iPhone 4G is capable of transmitting, and receiving, FM radio. Radio was one of those features endlessly requested for the iPod, and repeatedly turned down by Apple. But the prospect of being able to transmit the iPhone to a car radio might prove tempting. I think Apple is more likely to bypass this feature and never talk about it.

Is that it for the iPhone 4G?

So far so good. Although I'm not sure there's enough there to make me want to upgrade. It would involve another down payment of about £100-£200 and signing up for another 18-month contract at £35 per month. My wife has the old iPhone out of contract and only pays £20 per month; and she gets twice as much text and call allowance on top of the free data transfer.

Don't get me wrong, I think Apple is far from finished with the iPhone, and there's no other phone on the market that even remotely tempts me away from it. But if Apple wants me to drop money – more importantly if it wants me to go through the fun-filled procedure of queueing up outside O2 one sunny June morning – then there's got to be more than a bigger camera and a compass…

It's possible that Apple is going to go down the route of including a faster processor, which may be the one thing above all others that would make me rush out and buy one. I love the iPhone 3G but a little more oomph wouldn't go amiss. Especially now that the apps are making it more like a mini computer, and less like a mobile phone every day. A faster processor and some background processing capability could make a lot of difference in day-to-day usage.

Augmented reality

Looking a little further afield, there's a set of technologies here that seem lined up to take advantage of a new sphere of computing called augmented reality. I won't lie, it has shades of that old chestnut named virtual reality, and we all know how quickly that fad fizzled out.

I first heard of augmented reality after watching the slightly famous (if you're a major geek) Total Immersion D'Fusion demo from 2004. After showing it to my friends, and a collective round of "whoas", I mentally dismissed it as interesting, but unlikely to find any practical use in the real world. I'm glad Apple and others seemed to have more faith in it than me.

Augmented reality has been demonstrated on the iPhone by Blair MacIntyre, an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech. Basically it enables you to lay graphics over video (or input through the camera). This, in itself, isn't that much of a big deal, after all graphics and video have been together ever since the early days of laser disc. But combining this technology with a video camera, you can overlay graphics on top of whatever is coming through the camera at the time. Blair MacIntyre's demonstration has a miniature dog running around a table. The table is real (displayed via the iPhone's camera); the dog is a CGI animation.

So far, so cute; but real-life applications are far more interesting. There is an early tech app on the Android platform called WikiTude that shows how augmented reality might work in the real world. As you scan the phone around a scene (say, a London skyline) text markers highlight points of interest (Westminster Abbey, Millennium Wheel, St Paul's Cathedral, and so on). These are known as Fiduciary markers.

Moving further down the line it's not hard to look at Google Street view and wonder how that technology could be integrated with a real-world display. Navigating would be much easier if you simply held up the iPhone, and a line on the floor showed you where to walk.

The problem with augmented reality is that you need to know exactly where the camera is, and exactly which way it's facing, and– of course – you need to have a camera for it to have any real use. And what do you know… the iPhone has GPS, a built-in camera, and if rumours are correct, soon it will have a magnetometer.

I wonder what other uses Apple will find for augmented reality. Maybe the rose-tinted glasses that Apple aficionados are accused of wearing will one day become a physical reality. Putting soft-focus hearts around Macs and smiley faces on the front of Apple Stores. Maybe the iPhone is a big, elaborate ploy by Apple to turn Steve Jobs' famed reality distortion field into a physical reality?

Hell… I'd pay good money for a set of glasses that blocked out all of Dell's computers from my field of vision.

PS: I'll get round to the not-quite-an-iPod touch-not-quite-a-netbook rumour later in the week when I've done some more digging/

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Posted by: Mark Hattersley

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