Although the Tablet is obviously prompting a degree of speculative slathering unlike anything we’ve seen for the last years, the last month has seen a persistent trickle of next-gen iPhone rumors coming out as well. The latest is courtesy of Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Chan, who claims (amongst some “no duh” predictions like a 5-megapixel camera and a June release) that the 4G iPhone will have a new plastic casing similar to that used by Apple’s touch-panel Magic Mouse.
It’s an interesting theory, and one we’ve heard before. Certainly, the Magic Mouse does seem to suggest that Apple is thinking about ways to increase interactivity with a device’s non-hardware surfaces.
The question is: would an iPhone with, say, a Magic Mouse strapped to its back actually be productive? Holding my own phone and tracing my index finger across the back surface, it doesn’t really seem like it would add very much to the regular iPhone OS experience, since it is uniformly easier to make a multi-touch gesture with my thumb or free finger on the iPhone’s display than it performing the same gesture more-or-less enantiomorphically on the surface pointed away from me. But ergonomic concerns seem like they’d be less important to Apple than concerns about the iPhone’s perceived thickness, which a Magic Mouse style backpanel could only make thicker. Unacceptable for a company as obsessed with design svelteness as Apple.
It wouldn’t be the first time an analyst just hit the Internet and issued an authoritative prediction on a new Apple product based upon the first two dozen search results that come up. One thing’s for certain, though: the iPhone is due for a more drastic re-imagining after three years, and I expect the iPhone 4G to be far different than just a slight spec bump.
[image via kumazo on Flickr]
