Whether it comes in June or it comes in September as the latest rumors suggest, people aren’t really expecting the hardware to be a shock. It’ll definitely pack Apple’s new A5 SoC as boasted by the iPad 2; it might boast a Qualcomm baseband allowing the same hardware to run on both CDMA and GSM networks; it will probably have a revised antenna design to mitigate the chances of Antennagate II. These are no-brainers.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s of Concord Securities supports this view of the next hardware, with a twist: she says that the iPhone 5 will be announced in September and start production that same month, but not be released until October.
Kuo’s got a pretty good record here. In the past, he successfully forecast the quality (or lack thereof) of the iPad 2’s cameras, as well as predicted that the white iPhone 4 wouldn’t be released until April of this year. Hardly Criswellian soothsaying, but not bad.
Kuo also claims that when the iPhone 5 is released, it will boast an 8MP camera sensor. We’re guessing he’s talking about this one, which not only will allow the iPhone to shoot in 1080p video, but will also improve image quality by affording the smartphone 35% better low light sensitivity.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
