You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.

While Apple may tinker with the final packaging and design of the final phone, it’s clear that the features in this lost-and-found next-generation iPhone are drastically new and drastically different from what came before. Here’s the detailed list of our findings:

What’s new

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It’s unclear if it’s the 960×460 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the “Connect to iTunes” screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic

What’s changed

• The back is entirely flat, made of either glass (more likely) or ceramic or shiny plastic in order for the cell signal to poke through. Tapping on the back makes a more hollow and higher pitched sound compared to tapping on the glass on the front/screen, but that could just be the orientation of components inside making for a different sound
• An aluminum border going completely around the outside
• Slightly smaller screen than the 3GS (but seemingly higher resolution)
• Everything is more squared off
• 3 grams heavier
• 16% Larger battery
• Internals components are shrunken, miniaturized and reduced to make room for the larger battery

This information was sourced from Gizmodo’s recent article about the next iPhone. Apparently this iPhone has indeed been reported lost by Apple… and unsurprisingly, they want it back.

So, is this a clever marketing ploy by Apple or is someone at Apple very much fired?

iPhone users now have a choice in their web browsing experience!

I previously ran a post regarding Opera Mini being sent to Apple for approval. I also had a post in the works for how Opera Mini was still not released to the App Store.

However, in a turn of events, it seems Apple have approve Opera Mini for inclusion in the App Store after 20 days, 8 hours and 31 minutes (to be unnecessarily precise). This count is was available on Opera Mini’s website ever since it was sent to Apple for approval. Although not an iPhone user myself, I know several people who will be relieved to have additional browser choice beyond the default Safari web browser which is built-in.

One of its best features being the automatic reformatting of text columns in websites so they fit on your phone’s screen regardless of its orientation. This makes reading on it fantastic, as scrolling left and right continually is just not required, as it so commonly is with the N97′s built in web browser.

Anyway, it turns out the iPhone is getting the Opera Mini goodness shortly.

Well, that is the optimisitic view point at least. Opera have submitted the browser to the Apple App Store and are now just awaiting confirmation that the App will go live. They have even put up a counter stating the amount of “Time since Opera Mini was submitted”. As of typing this, the counter currently stands at just over ten hours.

Apparently, whoever guesses closest to the time at which Opera Mini goes live can win a new iPhone. Interesting. It seems to me that Opera Mini breaches Apple’s own terms which state that submitted applications should not duplicate existing or ‘built in’ iPhone functionality… such as web browsing, which Safari already does.

“Your move Apple” says an article on Mashable, and rightly so. Let’s hope their move is the right one for their users – choice.

What do you think? Is this counter the real deal or merely a marketing ploy and a bit of a stab at Apple? Will Opera Mini really get accepted to the App store?

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps”

The iPhone apps, when scaled up to iPad’s larger screen, did not live up to Steve Jobs’ expectation, so due to this, they were scraped from the iPad’s release operating systems. Rumours exist that these apps will be added in a later update to the iPad’s operating system. This is quite important too, as the missing applications are simple and rather fundamental computing programs which I would personal expect to be in any modern general purpose device.

Missing Apps on the iPad

The list of applications scraped from the iPad’s operating system is as follows.

1. Clock – Something as important as the clock application is missing?
2. Calculator – Surely a similar app will be released to compensate the lack of a Calculator app?
3. Weather – No doubt a good third-party whether app will take the place of this if no official weather application is released.
4. Voice Memos – Seems it should still be in there? Why remove it?
5. Stocks – Not fundamental to all users by any means, but should still be a nice default.

Questions for existing iPhone users:

• Why would Apple really want these applications removed other than merely that they look ‘weird’?
• If you had an iPad, would you want these applications to be there as standard? If so, which ones?
• Are these applications (on the iPhone) used regularly and important to you already?

“The release of Apple’s ever popular smartphone, the iPhone, back in mid 2007 caused a huge development spike in websites and dynamic web applications designed the mobile devices. Of course, the vast majority of these mobile website were developed specifically with the iPhone in mind, however the results were beneficial to pretty much all smartphones with the capability the browse the web and with some form of web browser application.

So, why do I think the iPad will slow this development in the mobile web market? The iPad is a mobile device itself is it not?

Well, perhaps not. Apple’s iPad does indeed use an operating system very similar to the iPhone, with backwards compatibility with almost all of the iPhone’s downloadable apps, and yes, it is mobile in the true sense of the word – it can be easily carried around unlike a full desktop computer and much more easily than a typically larger and much heavier laptop. However, the one aspect of the iPad which stands out is its native screen resolution of 1024×768″

If you’re interested, feel free to read the full article on how the iPad may affect the development of mobile websites in the near future.