on 3 July 2009Thank goodness for the iPhone 3GS. It’s a marvellous boon to productivity, not because I’m using it, but because now that it’s come out I can stop reading all the rumours about what’s going to be in it.
Apple, of course, never comments on unreleased products, unless shutting down websites that speculate about them counts as comment. It does at least help to identify the speculation that might enjoy a nodding acquaintance with reality, as opposed to all the other speculation, which isn’t even worth complaining about because it’s based on badly Photoshopped pictures of previous-generation Apple kit modified with pipe cleaners and sticky-backed plastic. Recent examples include the $99 4GB iPhone, distinguished from existing models not by any evidence of it costing $99 or having 4GB of memory but by the headphone socket being moved from the top to the bottom.
To paraphrase Richard Feynman, this doesn’t make sense because it isn’t sufficiently counter-intuitive. If they’d said Apple was going to put the headphone socket on the back, requiring a compressed right-angled plug available only from the Apple Store and incorporating a descrambling chip without which every iTunes track would sound like ‘Ooh to Be Ah’ by Kajagoogoo, that I would have believed.
Even the sensible rumours were silly. A videoconferencing camera? Yes, because what today’s slim, pocketable, compact smartphone needs is two cameras to shoehorn in. And trying to hold your phone still while keeping your head aligned with the frame and simultaneously peering at a three-inch image of your chat buddy would be such a rewarding experience. To be fair, at least it would only be annoying for about ten minutes, because after that the battery would run out.
What else? An FM radio. True, I do miss that feature in my old Sony Ericsson. Every time I went to Tesco’s, I would untangle my earphones, plug them in, turn on Radio 4, find The Archers was on, swear, wait for it to finish, hear three minutes of the following programme, arrive at Tesco’s, walk in, lose reception, spend the next 25 minutes listening to crackles, take out the earphones to not appear rude to the cashier, leave, put the earphones back in, catch the announcer signing off the programme, discover it was followed by a drama starring Robert Lindsay, swear, take the earphones out and walk home in silence. Nice.
The FM radio rumour may itself have been a misinterpretation of the FM transmitter rumour, which suggested the iPhone would be able to broadcast your iTunes to your car radio without requiring one of those plug-in gadgets. Except that those plug-in gadgets always make your music sound like you just found it in the glovebox on a C90 cassette that you recorded off Top of the Pops in 1988, and that’s without the additional challenge of doing it from inside an iPhone. Besides which, are there actually any gaps left in the UK FM spectrum that haven’t been filled by obscure community radio licences separated from each other only by decimal points?
Oh yes, and the most widely trumpeted feature of all: a black bezel. This must qualify as the most boring rumour since any rumour about Lindsay Lohan. Who in the world could care? No bezel at all would have been good; it always seemed an un-Ive-ish aspect of the design, more Moschino than minimal, and prone to trapping dust motes in the crack between bezel and screen, like those old Mac cases that seemed to consist entirely of ridges. But a switch from silver to black would have only one purpose: to make iPhone 3G fanboys so embarrassed to be seen with a conspicuously out-of-date model that they’d be forced to queue up at their nearest O2 store with a suitcase full of cash to buy out their contract. And given the current economic climate, they might have been more inclined to queue up outside Steve Jobs’ house with pitchforks. Or, you know, get a life.
Anyway, with the 2009 iPhone out of the way it’s time to start speculating about the 2010 model. Here are One More Thing’s predictions for the top new features.
Twitter Birdie A robot version of the Twitter icon that pops out of the iPhone and reads aloud any tweets from anyone you’re following, in case splashing every SMS across the middle of your screen isn’t sufficiently indiscreet. The Birdie also calls out ‘Say cheese!’ when you point the camera and performs a loud wolf whistle when adult content is accessed on YouTube. If the Canary option is activated, the Birdie keels over ten minutes before the battery runs out. Note: use of this function may reduce battery life to approximately ten minutes.
Built-in Hasselblad H3DII-50 Take 50 megapixel commercial-quality photos on your iPhone! Although this will increase the iPhone’s selling price to £19,999 (including the new standard 256GB of memory) and means plans to make the case slimmer may have to be shelved, it was felt to be an essential feature.
eBook reader Responding to competition from Amazon’s Kindle, Apple will equip the iPhone with an ‘electronic paper’ screen that folds out to tabloid size, although it won’t display tabloid newspapers, which have been excluded on grounds of taste and decency from the list approved for the forthcoming News Store. As a copyright protection measure, anyone attempting to read over your shoulder will have their eyes pecked out by the Twitter Birdie.
Apple Rumour Generator A new iApp that crawls the Internet for speculation about upcoming Apple products, then calculates all the possible rumours that haven’t yet been voiced and broadcasts them via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and that other one you always forget to update. Integrates with eNough, which displays a picture of a wall on your iPhone screen and uses the accelerometer to detect when you repeatedly bang your head off it.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper