iTWire - More iPhone clues and rumours

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More iPhone clues and rumours

by Stephen Withers

Thursday, 31 May 2007

The iPhone rumour mill has been working overtime this week.

Apple's advertising for an 'iPhone Flash File System Engineer'. Some people are interpreting this as a sign that future iPhones will feature support for removable flash memory cards of one form or another, but we think that's drawing a long bow. Apple has already announced the iPhone will come with 4 or 8G of memory, and it seems most unlikely that it won't be flash.

It's important to get filesystems right for flash storage, as repeated writes to a small range of locations have the effect of shortening the useful life of the chip. Writing more evenly across the entire device maximises its life. Accordingly, we're not at all surprised that Apple is continuing development in this area, and in the absence of any inside info, we'd be amazed if this was a completely new position.

And talking of memory, Vim3 claims a "source from an Apple affiliate" says the iPhone will arrive with substantially more memory than Apple currently admits.

The same source tips a user-replaceable battery, draft N Wi-Fi, iTunes streaming via Wi-Fi, and iTunes Store access via Wi-Fi or over the air. All of these sound perfectly feasible.

Why is the battery likely to be replaceable? We've yet to see a mobile phone where the SIM card wasn't behind the battery. If you have, please leave a comment. Our guess is that there's a very good reason why a SIM shouldn't be removed or replaced while a phone is powered up, and hiding it behind the battery is a simple and elegant way of ensuring that can't happen. Also, batteries have a shorter lifetime than phones, and the number of aftermarket battery replacement kits shows that Apple didn't get this aspect right with the iPod.

On the other hand, Vim3's suggestion that the iPhone will support versions of iWork and iLife seems far-fetched, but we're willing to be proved wrong. A Keynote viewer is plausible, but word processing and spreadsheets? We'll see soon enough.

Rumours of a 3G version of the iPhone have been circulating since the device was first announced, and as we've previously discussed, Quanta has admitted that it "may have receive the order to make the second generation of the Apple iPhone. iPhone is a smartphone based mobile, and the second generation model shipment is expected in September 2007 with forecast of 5 million units in 2008."

That timeframe is consistent with previous reports of a European model by September. The big question is whether it will be a 2.5G or 3G model.

HardMac (the English translation of French site MacBidouille) says "reliable sources" say the European model will be 3G. Apple's choice of a European partner is down to Orange and Vodafone, and that the stumbling blocks are price and the volume commitment Apple is insisting upon.

So a 3G iPhone could well be on European (and Asia Pacific, please!) Christmas lists.{moscomment}

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