Disclaimer: This piece is an offshoot of the writer taking a nosedive into scuttlebutts and rumour mills. Hence, the scribe cannot be held responsible, liable or blameworthy for eventual unpleasant surprises, unfulfilled promises or indeed Premature Ventricular Contractions.
Being tech savvy connotes that one is multiple times more impatient than how God intended us to be. And if you’re one of the Apple brigade, you know that you’d make a four-year old spoilt brat, who has just seen her favourite Barbie, seem like a sculpture of tranquility. Therefore, even though the launch-date of the not-so-originally (and indeed tentatively) titled iPhone 5 is a good few months away, you just can’t help sniffing around for a preview of what to expect.
While the iPhone 4S launched in October last year was a small jump, the iPhone 5 is being touted as a prodigious leap – technically speaking at least. There are rumours being radiated, from as diverse origins as South Korean newspapers and Chinese manufacturing companies, that the latest iPhone offspring would feature a “gigantic” 4.6-inch display. Not only is this 31.43 percent screen size hike, from the previous 3.5-inch display, quite colossal on its own, what it also implies is that the new display would need significantly more pixels than the 960 x 640, which the previous edition had. Maybe it’s the increasing size of the competitors that has led to this potential manoeuvre by Apple, or maybe it’s just that bigger is the new better! All the same, the magicians that work in the garb of iPhone engineers might believe that pulling rabbits of increasing sizes out of the proverbial hat might have become a tad boring, hence, they might just be vying to pull out a giraffe this time round – and who would want to bet against them!
The word is that the new iPhone would also feature an iPad-esque sharp ‘retina’ display, which might just end up forcing English language professors to mull over revamping both the idioms, ‘as sharp as a razor’ and indeed ‘as sharp as a tack’. Then there is the scrumptious prospect of a new dock plug, which is much smaller in size – a 30-pin dock connector, and the forecast of the speed soaring up by as much as tenfold. Also, in a move reminiscent of Siri and iCloud in iPhone 4S – which proved to be blockbuster successes – Apple wants to go down the same lane and conjure up a new software. Hence, after iOS 5.1, the latest edition might just throw the iOS 6 flavour in the ‘apple pie’.
From the groundbreaking ‘big’ of the display, Apple is being said to go the ‘small’ route with the next SIM card size. And just like in this iPhone centric world of skewed adjectives, the impending display is said to be ‘gigantic’, the new nano SIM card is virtually microscopic. Nevertheless, despite all the forecasted coolness left, right and center the much hankered after memory storage hop from 64GB to 128GB is something that might have to wait – unless Apple is planning on staging a classic ‘surprise surprise’ act. All in all, the new features seem to be coming straight out of the reservoir of unparalleled coolness, and the latest iPhone edition must just comprehensively upset the ‘applecart’ of the rivals.
The writer is Sub-Editor, Pakistan Today. He can be reached at khulduneshahid@gmail.com