Outside of apple, nobody knows. It could be bigger and heavier or it could be smaller and lighter. We'll find out in a few months.
Yep, I'm not saying they should stick at current levels forever. But remember what they've done in the past: some years it's barely changed, the next year gave a big update. iPhone 2g->3g? No change. 3g->3gs? Big speed increase, new GPU. 3gs->4? Big speed increase, same GPU. 4->4S? Move to dual core, new GPU. 4S->5?
It just doesn't make sense to put the A5X GPU in the iPhone, at least at this point. Even at 32nm, it would likely eat up battery power too fast and get too hot. In an iPad with lots of aluminium to soak up the heat and a massive battery that's OK, in a very thin phone with a small battery it isn't. I can't see this changing before the iPhone 6 (or 5S).
Also, note that what I suggested (a clock speed increase) would still give a decent speed up.
4:3 on a phone? AND a bigger screen? That would make it seriously weird. It'd be like a mini-ipad! 16:9 makes more sense for a phone that 4:3. But why change the aspect ratio? All existing apps would have to be re-written to work properly with it. You'd get a black border all the way round current apps - it would be horrible.
The only way I can see a screen size /aspect change is if they make it just a little bigger (they said 'retina' is 300ppi on a phone, and the current screen is 326 - so they can stretch it a little without changing res, and it's still retina). Some rumours said they would go to 3.7", and the phone size would barely change because the side bezels would be thinner. This would work very well.
The other way is to go wider (maybe 16:9), but keep the current width. This way current apps will run normally, but there will be an empty space at one end of the screen (which could be used for notifications or something, without interrupting the app).
If they do that, I'm pretty sure it will have worse battery life than the current model. And it might be bigger. Most apps won't see any speed increase (because it's still a dual core A9, probably at the exact same speed to keep the power use down). A (very few) games will have better graphics.
That doesn't sound like a good upgrade to me at all
No they haven't. They've given good performance upgrades when it was practical, without compromising something else too much. Other times they've given us a minor speed bump but with other benefits (like the iPhone 4 - much better screen + battery life, but the A4 wasn't a massive improvement and the GPU was the same as the 3GS!)
Again, no it isn't. Want to know what they should do to dominate mobile gaming? Ensure a massive number of devices have pretty much the same CPU + GPU power. This way us developers can optimise heavily for it, and push the platform to do amazing things. Look at the consoles - the platform is fixed, and developers can push it right to the limit. Games on a console look many times better than they do on a PC with equivalent hardware, this is why. You don't have lots of different configs to support, just one - and you learn it inside out, find every last trick to squeeze more performance from it.
If we have to support the iPhone 4, 4S and 5 with an A5X, we have to make 3 different versions of the game to support 3 platforms with very different levels of CPU + GPU power. In practice, we make it for the iPhone 4 and add a few fancy features for the rest (if you're lucky!). You're playing iPhone 4 games on your iPhone 5. Games built for hardware 2 generations old. This isn't how you dominate mobile games
If you look at the iPhone + iPad in the last few years there's a pattern: The iPhone 4s has roughly 80% of the pixels the iPad 2 has. The iPhone 4s is 80% of the speed of the iPad 2. For graphics, they're actually equally powerful.
The iPad 3 keeps the same CPU, but doubles the GPU power. I suspect quadrupling it wasn't possible, but actually you don't need 4x the power to draw 4x the pixels when the screen size is the same. 2x is pushing it, but it's more or less enough.
