Samsung’s Galaxy S III has gotten off to a great start, and according to one company executive, it has already sold 10 million units. But it’s the upcoming iPhone that the majority of us are waiting for, according to a new survey. Demand for the iPhone 5 is “strikingly higher” that that of any other iPhone, and when smartphone sales hit an all-time high this fall, Apple will be the number one beneficiary.
According to a French blog site, the highly anticipated iPhone 5 featuring a larger screen and a 19-pin dock connector will be released on Friday, September 21, 2012.
Even though the iPhone 4S didn’t come with a radical new design and a few features customers were hoping for, it was still Apple’s most popular iPhone ever. During the first quarter of its availability, Apple sold over 37 million iPhone 4S units, but analyst Gene Munster says Apple is going to murder than number and sell at least 80 million iPhone 5’s.
Even though Apple hasn’t confirmed the iPhone 5, nor whether it will use the mini SIM card it won the design proposal for, many European mobile carriers are placing orders for the tiny little smartphone cards in anticipation of the iPhone 5 launch, which is rumored to drop in September or October of this year.
We already know that Chinese manufacturers are hard at work producing all kinds of cases for Apple’s new iPhone, a device which isn’t expected to make its public debut for at least another three months. And despite plenty of competition, it seems some of them are more than happy to hand over the specifications they’re using for their products.
According to the drawing you see above, some manufacturers are expecting the sixth-generation iPhone to measure just 7.9mm thin, 58.6mm wide, and 123.8mm tall. That’s 1.4mm thinner and 8.6mm taller than the iPhone 4S.
We’re still a few months away from Apple’s new iPhone unveiling, but that hasn’t stopped a number of Chinese retailers from selling the device in advance. They’re using the mockup pictures that have been circulating for weeks to make a quick buck from the hotly-anticipated handset, with some asking for as much as $8,600 a piece.
Hardware news site Kitguru.net has put up an extensive gallery of images which they believe is the iPhone 5 in the wild. We disagree: this is pretty clearly a rough model someone has put together for the purpose of getting the jump on making cases or accessories. But it still shows what the consensus is amongst accessory makers with ties to the Far East about what the next iPhone will look like.
Yet another picture of the front panel destined for Apple’s next-generation iPhone has surfaced online via Chinese technology blog MyDrivers. Like the others we’ve seen, this one reportedly sports a 4-inch display, along with in-cell touch technology that makes the panel thinner than its predecessors. However, the panel in this image looks no different to an iPhone 4S panel to me.
Foxconn Chairman and President Terry Gou didn’t get where he is by mouthing off details about secret products he is building to the press, but according to a new report, he’s just confirmed that the iPhone 5 is coming… and it’ll make the Samsung Galaxy S III look like a hunk of junk. If it didn’t already.
Up until a year and a half ago, U.S. customers had almost choice of carrier or rate plans when buying an iPhone. That’s something that has changed dramatically. The iPhone’s launch on Verizon and Sprint followed by several regional carriers across the country and the recent introduction of the iPhone as an option on prepaid networks Cricket and Virgin Mobile.
The new prepaid iPhone options may seem pricey because Cricket offers a very limited subsidies to attract iPhone 4 and 4S buyers and Virgin offers no discount or subsidy at all. As we noted earlier, however, paying the cost of the iPhone up front can actually save you money overall if you go with either Cricket or Virgin.
Beyond the upfront costs, however, there’s a big question to consider: will either prepaid carrier be included in the launch of the iPhone 5? While there isn’t a solid answer at this point, it seems likely that they won’t.