Thursday, June 23, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Will iPhone 5 Have Dual LED ?, Whither Siri?, And Why An iPhone 5 Lite Would Be A Smart Strategy For Apple

Posted: 23 Jun 2011 08:02 AM PDT


The Taiwanese IT industry newswatcher site Digitimes’ Siu Han and Steve Shen are reporting that recent insider rumors indicate that the iPhone 5 will likely ship with a dual-LED flash, with Taiwan-based LED packaging firms Everlight Electronics, Edison Opto and Lite-On Technology being pinpointed as potential suppliers, although [ahem....] all related companies are denying involvement with production of dual-LED flashes.

Han and Shen note that these new rumors seem to be related to market reports that Apple has reduced orders for Lumileds high-power LED flash products from Philips electronics recently, and switched to the Taiwanese OEMs for LED flash modules. The article suggests that Edison Opto, which specializes in production of high-power LEDs, has LED flash modules in production and shipping to other smartphone makers, and consequently is considered to be a front-runner to win dual-LED flash orders from Apple according to Digitimes’ as-usual unnamed sources.

Dual flashes are already incorporated in some phone models from HTC and Nokia, to name two, and are said to brighten photo images in general as well as mitigating some common problems associated with single light source, camera-mounted flash photography, such as the dreaded red-eye and unattractive shadowing.

This rumor sounds plausible, and especially interesting to photography buffs like me.

We also have an article up on the iPhone 5 News Ticker that collects some of the best reports around the web that have reported this story. Be sure to check them out here.

Another iPhone 5 talking point I haven’t seen chewed over a lot comes from BusinessInsider’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who wonders what’s happened regarding Siri, the mobile assistant app Apple acquired almost a year ago. Gobry describes Siri as a a mobile search engine of the sort he thinks would’ve been dominant had the Internet been initially developed to support smartphones instead of computers.

In a nutshell, you speak search topics to Siri, which according to Gobry uses uses artificial intelligence algorithms developed by the Pentagon using CIA funding, and the program runs with your request to try and match the best result. Sounds cool.

Gobry cautions that Steve Jobs has explicitly played-down the concept of turning Siri into an iPhone app, explaining that acquisition of the developer was in aid of hiring its engineers and not for the application specifically, but he personally thinks that Siri built right into the iOS would be such an amazing (and Google-trumping) feature, it’s hard to imagine Apple isn’t working on quietly in the background.

Not one for the iPhone 5 in any event.

Much more likely is the persistent rumor of a stripped-down iPhone 5 for less-developed markets. There are as usual different schools of thought about this, with some insisting that Apple would not want to dilute or “cheapen” its market image by offering a less-expensive iPhone variant, but others arguing that one area where the Android brigade continues to trounce Apple is on price, and the burgeoning market in the developing world is simply too large to be ignored. Not so much China, which is now Apple’s biggest iOS device market outside the U.S., but other populous but as yet less prosperous nations like India, Indonesia, Viet Nam, and it is to be hoped eventually Africa as well.

The much-debated Bloomberg news report earlier this week predicted that Apple is working on a presumably iPhone 4-based “cheaper version of the iPhone aimed at attracting customers in developing countries,” and
FastCompany’s Kit Eaton suggests that an “iPhone Lite” could translate into $billions in new sales for Apple, and that the rumored price-leader iPhone will most likely incorporate essentially the iPhone 4′s guts in a cheaper, probably plastic enclosure, and further notes that such a device could be the actual basis for rumor reports about a “radical “iPhone form factor overhaul the blogosphere’s been chattering about, such as scuttlebutt about a super-slim teardrop-shaped case design.

Eaton predicts that if the “iPhone Lite” materializes and can be sold at a price competitive with entry-level Android phones, none of which enjoys the high-end iPhone’s cachet and performance abilities, Apple will be giving Android a real run for the money in developing markets and further suggests that the cheaper model would also be offered in Apple’s traditional iPhone markets as “a swanky entry-level option for the rest of us,” and siphoning off more close-fisted potential handset buyers who would’ve otherwise gone with a cheaper Android phone.

BeatWeek has posted a very interesting food for thought musingon the psychology underlying and motivating consumer decisions to buy Android rather than iOS, suggesting that some Android buyers are merely cheapskates, others are geeks who by nature don't expect to pay for anything, and a third category simply don't want to invest money in their phone platform because they don't plan to be on it for long. Whatever, BeatWeek suggests that many are arriving at the conclusion “that they've been sold a geek-obsessed bill of goods, and that their next phone will need to be an actual iPhone if they indeed want the iPhone-like experience they've been promised,” observing that “how well Apple manages to leverage this low-hanging (if in some cases not yet ripe) fruit with the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 is up to them.”

Makes good rational sense to me, and as I see it, a price-leader iPhone would too.

What do you think?