iPhone 5: Siri 2.0, bigger screen, 4G LTE headline feature list

by Bill Palmer

The iPhone 5 will arrive in September, and the chief remaining question is what feature set it’ll offer: a new body style, a larger screen, faster networking, new colors, you name it. Each day, readers ask me just what the new iPhone will bring. That’s always a good question. A new and improved Siri 2.0 is a given, already confirmed by Apple CEO Tim Cook last month. And the iOS 6 operating system will power the iPhone 5 along with various other new and recent iDevices. Beyond that it’s all about hardware. It depends on whether Apple’s focus is on making the iPhone better, or making meaningless “improvements” in order to appease Android users who want to switch but are still basing their criteria on lies they’ve been told.

For instance the iPhone 4S has a much, much larger screen than any Android phone. On a handheld device resolution, not inches, dictates screen size. Android phones have 4.5 and 4.8 inch screens which makes them cumbersome but the resolution is so much lower than that of the iPhone that you have to hold it much further away from your face for it not to be fuzzy, so Android phones effectively have much smaller screens than the iPhone. But because the geeks have pounded home the lie that “iPhone has too small of a screen” many mainstream Android users are fearful of moving to iPhone because of the screen. Will Apple continue to attempt to educate the public on the facts about screen size, or will it give in to stupidity and increase the physical size of the iPhone 5 screen in order to silence the geeks who spend their days spreading anti-Apple lies? I don’t know…

4G LTE is another similar matter. Until someone (Apple) manages to invent a 4G LTE antenna that’s small and uses a reasonable amount of battery life, 4G LTE in smartphones continues to be a con game. Android phones ship with LTE turned off, and consumers falsely believe they’re using LTE when they’re really using 3G. If they figured out how to dig deeply enough into the settings to turn LTE on, they’d see that they’d get perhaps thirty minutes of battery life because LTE uses just that much power. The only true LTE device is the iPad 3, where it works because the iPad is ten inches big and nearly the entire insides of it a giant battery to power the LTE antenna. But there are no real LTE smartphones, only falsely marketed ones. Will Apple attempt to educate the public about LTE in smartphones being a con job by the carriers and the Android manufacturers, or will it give in to stupidity and include LTE in the iPhone as well? Or has Apple managed to invent a legitimate LTE antenna for use in the iPhone 5, and hasn’t told anyone yet?

Unfortunately, these are the biggest questions Apple faces: its products are the best in every measurable way, and its competitors know that so they make up every lie they can think of. The anti-Apple fanatics who write tech headlines and work at tech retail stores then spend all day repeating those lies in an attempt to trick people out of buying Apple products. To some degree that strategy works. Does Apple then make changes to the next iPhone aimed at making it even better than the inferior competition, or does it make changes aimed at canceling out the lies being told by geek lunatics so that even more people end up with the iPhone they wanted instead of the competing garbage they were conned into? Usually Apple tries to serve up a combination of both: legitimate improvements to appeal to those of us who know what we’re talking about, and tactical “improvements” to cancel out the lies being told by anti-Apple fanatics in positions of power. But trying to guess which combination of real and fake improvements Apple will serve up is a fool’s game.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.