14 DAY TRIAL // A person who is knowledgeable in all things related to the cell phone industry claims to have learned that Apple plans to drop the iPhone 3GS as a supported device for the upcoming major revision of iOS.
The John Gruber-equivalent in the cell phone industry, Eldar Murtazin (editor-in-chief for Mobile-Review.com, Analyst, MRG) tweeted a very interesting piece of information just a few hours ago.
The pundit wrote: “Just one comment. Apple iPhone 3Gs wont be upgradable to iOS 5.x. iPhone 4 will.”
Murtazin doesn’t say where or how he got his information. He also doesn’t specify whether the decision is final, although it certainly appears to be from his wording.
But Apple may well be testing the software against the two-year old 3GS for compatibility still.
Even though the company may have a few more bugs to iron out, iOS 5 may still be compatible with the handset’s ARM processor running at 600 MHz and the 256MB of RAM it packs.
However, if history is any indication, the cell phone reviewer is most probably right.
Apple barely got the original iPhone aboard the 3.0 train, whereas iOS 4.0 left both the original and the iPhone 3G in a trail of dust.
Even the higher-specced iPhone 3GS is having a hard time handling multitasking and other iOS 4-specific enhancements that demand not only the A4 chip, but also more random access memory to run smoothly.
If this is the case, we would assume the original iPad is also scrubbed off the iOS 5 compatibility list.
Following their thorough teardown of the Apple tablet last year, the tinkerers at iFixit could confirm that Apple had strangely equipped the tablet with just 256MB of RAM.
As such, the iPhone 4, iPod touch 4G and iPad 2 all have 512 megs of memory, which should make them all eligible for the upgrade to iOS 5.