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The thing I hate most about my 3GS (and why I didn't get a 4 and looks like I won't get a 5) is that, when you're in a pub or something, and everyone's iPhones are sitting on the table, it is pretty much impossible to tell them apart. Only last week I picked-up a friend's 1st gen thinking it was my 3GS. Even the message and email tones are all the same. The number of times I've heard my phone go off but it's turned out to be some other guy's on the next table.

Who in the hell has their phone out sitting on a table in a bar? Stupid, man.

I don't understand when people whine that the front has always looked the same. It's 80% LCD touch screen, an earpiece, and a button - there's not much you can change about that.
 
Who in the hell has their phone out sitting on a table in a bar? Stupid, man.

I don't understand when people whine that the front has always looked the same. It's 80% LCD touch screen, an earpiece, and a button - there's not much you can change about that.

Cars are 80% wheels, doors, seats and an engine - but I think most people can instantly tell apart a Ford and a Rolls Royce.
 
So the bits that have changed are the bits that 95% of people hide within a 3rd party cover?!

The thing I hate most about my 3GS (and why I didn't get a 4 and looks like I won't get a 5) is that, when you're in a pub or something, and everyone's iPhones are sitting on the table, it is pretty much impossible to tell them apart. Only last week I picked-up a friend's 1st gen thinking it was my 3GS. Even the message and email tones are all the same. The number of times I've heard my phone go off but it's turned out to be some other guy's on the next table.

Man, that really is a peeve. Not sure if you'll ever be happy though - the iPhone is very popular, and I think it might cost too much to make every unit individual so as to avoid such confusion. Then again, you could use a cover to help distinguish yours from everyone elses. Oh wait, you don't like that they cover up the bits that are different.. Sheesh, some people are hard to please..!

Maybe try a different phone? Or realise it's only a phone and so not worth getting annoyed about anyway? :)
 
If they keep the same design, will they give away new cases again? My case is starting to show some wear and tear. :)
 
I'm glad, 4 has a fantastic design and size.

Concentrate on working on internals and iOS 5 instead.
 
Question: If the new iPhone has a slightly larger screen, what will the resolution be? Would developers have to redo their apps again?
Yea, according to Milani, and the world will also end.

These cases clearly have rounded edges on the backside + they arent bumpers.

if anything, these cases hint to a design similar to iPad2 but with less sharp curves around the edge. More similar to the powerbook. Metal (liquid?) back seems nearly certain if this case is correct.

why does nobody _look_ at the image :confused:

Yeah, we're looking at those crappy amateurish images. You can't tell a damn thing from that horrid picture.

I was wondering about the screen too. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that the screen can be increased in size without the need for reducing the "retina" categorization. This assumes the same dimensions of the phone surface. Check it:
Current dimensions of screen = 7.6 by 5.1 mm, or 38.76 mm^2. If we squeeze 3 mm in width and 5 mm in height (realistic given current layout of home button and speaker/camera) then the new dimensions would be 8.1 by 5.4 mm, or 43.74 mm^2. This is only a 12.8% increase in screen size.
Now, "retina" explained on pcworld http://www.pcworld.com/article/198201/iphone_4s_retina_display_explained.html suggests that anything above 300 ppi is not really perceivable. Current iP4 is 326ppi, so dropping to 300 is an 8.66% decrease, more than my above calculation.

I bet the screen size increases by roughly 10% with no change in resolution and no need for redoing apps for the slight change in resolution. After all, we can just hold the phone 10% farther from our face and the difference will be imperceptible.
Bingo. According to Milani, though, all apps will have to be rewritten from the ground up.

is it only me or the edges of the internal of the cases are a bit of curved as iPhone 1?:confused:
Read below please.
No, it's not only you, I don't know why most people think they are the same as the square iP4 cases.
You to.

Hummm... they say "promotional images". They look like horribly done ones at that. The thickness seems bulky and the dimensions are not consistent. It looks out of proportion to me and like an amateurish rendering.

So... given that, I don't think we can determine much of anything other than it's an iPhone case.
Finally, someone else sees those images for the crap they are.

this would mean larger pixels / less dpi right?
What you fail to let sink in, though, is that the display is currently at something like 326ppi which is well above what the human eye can detect, so they can increase the screen 10% or so and you still won't be able to see a difference.
 
The actual product is called iPhone, iPad, etc. The number is for telling what version it is. :rolleyes:

You know, like Mac OS X.


So why can't they advertise like this then:

Screen%20shot%202011-03-17%20at%204.52.30%20PM.png



Instead of this:

Screen%20shot%202011-03-17%20at%204.51.59%20PM.png
 
Back Looks different.

The back edge of this case doesn't look square like the Iphone 4 . It appears to be slightly rounded.
 
And all of us Verizon customers were absolute idiotsmfor buying iPhone 4s because the iPhone 5 was supposed to be an earth-shattering upgrade. I'm guess it's more like the iPhone 4gs. :) It'll get the iPads new processor, better graphics capability and not much else.

You do realize that it's this same advancement in the 3GS (faster processor) that rendered all earlier phones obsolete. They don't run multitasking, irrespective of which they are still slow, and they will only continue to miss out on software features going forward.

You have a great phone in the 3GS. But the 4GS (regardless of what it's called) will likely become the new supported benchmark going forward like the 3GS is now. Therefore, it will be a great phone to get if you're going to be on a 3 year contract.
 
If there was ever a time that Apple needs to do it's best, it's with the iPhone 5.

No matter what each of our opinions is about iP4, the facts are it received both positive and negative reviews. If Apple is going to be perceived as the premier company they pose as, it's time to live up to it. Just because they sell like wildfire only proves how gullible people can be.
 
Agreed. *facepalm*
I've had enough of people saying the iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS upgrade was "minor", and so the iPhone 4 to the "iPhone 4GS" (don't know where they got that name from) will be minor too.
It's so sad to see distorted views that people have, just because they want to feel better about having a year old device.
From reading this thread, i noticed that to people a major upgrade = if externals change. It's pretty pathetic, imo. You can't reason with such people.

Btw MacRumors, there's already a topic about it : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1118514/ ;)

I feel like the only people who consider the 3G to 3GS as a minor upgrade haven't used both. The 3GS is much more snappy and responsive. I'll take a iPhone 4S any day of the week. Obviously I would prefer 4G added and NFC (although the NFC isn't a very big deal to me honestly), but I'm already drooling over the thought of an iPhone 4 with the dual-core A5. The iPhone already runs like a champ with its "weak processor" (compared to some of the newer Androids), probably because it's not bloated down with a bunch of background processes. But a dual-core A5 is going to make the transitions instant.
 
Would not be too surprising if the iPhone 5 is similar to the iPhone 4 in many ways. Conventional wisdom now says that the big future change will be the 2012 iPhone 6 with LTE. If you want to make a statement by changing the form factor, that would be the time.

The obvious change will be the addition of a dual-core A5.

The non-obvious change would be to add a second antenna to the GSM model.
This is not the place to discuss RF details, but the big problem with mobile wireless (cell, wifi, bluetooth) is something called fading, which means that, while the *average* strength of the channel is pretty good, it frequently drops DRAMATICALLY, and during that dropped period you obviously lose bits, which means garbled speech and lost packets. Fading has the characteristic that it changed very rapidly both in time (over a period of 10 ms or less) and space (over a few cm, for the wavelengths of interest).

Fading CAN, in theory, be combatted to some extent at the cell tower using concepts like
- beam steering (use multiple antennas on the cell tower to direct energy at the cellphone target, rather than over the full 360 degrees of space)
- MAC diversity (track which phones currently have better quality channels, and give them preferential access)
- Alamouti coding (this is a very clever way of essentially sending the same [but slightly modified] signal to the phone from two different antenna, and the phone picks up, essentially whichever of these signals is stronger. It needs support in the phone to work, whereas the prior two do not --- but it does not need the cell tower to track as finely where the phone is, and its channel quality.)

All three of these are supported by the latest 3G specs, but I do not know which (if any) ATT supports. (And the answer may vary depending on how new the cell tower is.)

However ANOTHER way of combatting fading is to have two antennas in the phone. The hope, then, is that when one of the antennas experiences fading, the other probably does not (remember what I said about fading varying over a spatial scale of a few cm). This actually works astonishingly well.
You need two antennas, two RF chains, and some logic that combines the signals. The simplest form of this logic chooses the stronger signal, but there are smarter things that can be done that combine the two signals.
This is called receive diversity.

(Once you have two antennas, there are a bunch of further things you can do, which ascend to cleverer and cleverer heights, and which ultimately give you fewer dropped packets, better range, and/or higher up and downlink data rates. These tricks are all used in modern wifi, but I expect will not be used much by 3G, though they will be used by 4G.)

Note that VZW mandates that ALL devices on its network have to use receive diversity. (And of course the CDMA iPhone4 does so.) This is probably one reason why they have the reputation they do for being a more "robust" network. In the simplest cases, as I have described, receive diversity does not improve bandwidth, but it does mean far fewer packets are dropped. If ATT had a brain in their head they would mandate the same thing for their network.

My point, however, is that Apple has done all the low-level engineering now to put two cell antennas on a phone and combine the signals. There is no reason they could not apply that same tech to the iPhone5 GSM version --- and the extra reliability would be nice, given the stupid brouhaha (which still gets raised occasionally) about death grips and dropped packets/dropped calls.
 
I feel like the only people who consider the 3G to 3GS as a minor upgrade haven't used both.

True, but this requires a bit more explanation. It's the 3G owners who are complaining. They locked in for at least 2 years to get their 3G and couldn't upgrade when the 3Gs was released (at least not without major expense). Therefore, they justified having painfully slow hardware with the "minor upgrade" mantra. Some of them may still be using the 3G and others upgraded it directly to the iPhone 4, bypassing the 3Gs entirely.

There's one more group who are ignorant about everything except looks. The 3Gs looks similar and they don't understand the changes.

The 3Gs was a big upgrade. As you said, people who have used both know that.
 
If there was ever a time that Apple needs to do it's best, it's with the iPhone 5.

No matter what each of our opinions is about iP4, the facts are it received both positive and negative reviews. If Apple is going to be perceived as the premier company they pose as, it's time to live up to it. Just because they sell like wildfire only proves how gullible people can be.

Gullible? Where do you people come from?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; en-gb; Blade Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)

iPad 2 specced internals in a iPhone 4 style chassis with a larger screen?

What is not to like about this rumour? I'd be up for some of that.
 
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