14 DAY TRIAL // It seems more and more likely that Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement won’t make it to WWDC 2011, but sometime in fall (September-October, reports indicate), although an iOS 5 announcement may be the centerpiece of Apple’s developer keynote this summer. Apple has recently announced the schedule for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
The event is set to begin June 6 in San Francisco’s Moscone West, with a focus on “the future of iOS and Mac OS”.
Citing the need for more battery performance under LTE strain, ZDnet reports that the rumored iPhone 5 launch in the September - October timeframe is mostly a result of Apple having to make the software meet the proper hardware requirements, and vice versa.
The iPhone 5 will need to support LTE, the blog notes, and Apple cannot miss the boat with AT&T flipping the switch on its own implementation of the standard quite soon.
Most importantly, heavily rumored cloud services that are said to be the heart and soul of iOS 5 will need LTE networking, but battery life remains a problem.
However, if Apple achieves advancements in this area (and we can expect it to, as it has done so once every 6 months the past few years), the LTE iPhone 5 will effectively turn the iPhone 3GS into the much-rumored, consumer-oriented iPhone nano, or iPhone mini, the report suggests.
Jefferies analyst Peter Misek is quoted in as saying in a research note that, “In addition to the later OS, we believe Apple wants its next phone to be LTE capable and have a chipset compatible with both AT&T and Verizon (with the LTE capability on AT&T turned on once their network is ready).”
“Also, we believe the iPhone 5 could contain new chips from Qualcomm incorporating GPS and WiFi on the same chip (and in the future the socket could support Bluetooth and NFC),” Misek added.
However, if the next version of the iOS mobile operating system is being built around Apple’s next-generation iPhone, the current versions of the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad may not get the same software update this fall.
A preview of iOS 5 is widely expected at WWDC 2011.