It's a bad time for Apple as the sales of iPhone 4S are going down in UK. And, if the verdicts of experts are to be believed, it's a definite indication of the launch of the next generation iPhone.
According to a Financial Times report, iPhone 4S, which is one of the best selling smartphone in the UK, is possibly at its all-time low as the sales of the handset fell from a quarter sold in March to about one fifth of all handsets sold in June.
When news of a new product hits the market, drop in the number of sales for an old product becomes inevitable. Therefore, dropping sales for iPhone 4S is not surprising rather it gives a clear indication that the next generation iPhone is to release anytime soon.
If we ride back in time we see, back in last year the same incident took place when Apple showed its fourth quarter report. The company fell short of expectations of 17.07 million units and the drop reached its peak in the second half of the same quarter as a result of unseemly hype over the new iPhone.
And, the hype over the next iPhone created so much of pent-up demand that soon as the company launched iPhone 4S, which was, by the way, not a new iPhone and rather an updated version of the existing iPhone 4, sales reached to new highs and Apple sold over four million units in the opening weekend. As a result, the Cupertino tech giant showed record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share.
The kind of unremitting hype that the soon-to-be launched iPhone 5 has created, it does not take any expert to assume that, despite its current dismal sales condition, Apple will certainly make a major come-back in terms of sales in first quarter of 2013.
According to various reports and rumors, the purported iPhone 5 will come with groundbreaking features and will easily outdo the 4S, the first Apple smartphone to sport Retina Display and Siri voice dictation features. Apple will undoubtedly make the sixth generation iPhone better in such a way that it wins back what the company is losing in terms of numbers right now. But, how? Check out below:
4-inch Screen
Bigger sized Android phones have seemingly given a good threat to Apple! Until now no iPhone has had a bigger than 3.5-inch screen, but according to Reuters, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, Apple is ordering bigger screens from its Asian suppliers.
While Reuters reported about a bigger iPhone with a 4.6-inch display, the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the plans, reported about a 4-inch display. The report further added that Apple is currently working with several screen makers including LG, Sharp and Japan Display Inc. for its next iPhone.
Retina Display and Resolution
iPhone 4S sports a 3.5-inch LED-backlit IPS TFT, capacitive touchscreen with 960 x 640 pixels resolution and 330 ppi pixel density.
iPhone 5, according to 9to5mac, will feature 1,136x640 display. Other reports indicate that the iPhone will feature a Quantum Dot LED curved glass edge-to-edge display with 16 x 9 aspect ratio and 367ppi pixel density.
Camera
iPhone 4S touts an 8 mega pixel iSight camera that comes with custom lens with a larger f/2.4 aperture, an improved backside illumination sensor, excellent auto white balance, advanced color accuracy, face detection and reduced motion blur.
Meanwhile, reports claim that the iPhone 5 will have a 3D camera and the camera will capture light and image information to create an incredible 3D image that can be seen without glasses.
While 3D camera is nothing new in today's mobile devices, Apple believes the existing 3D cameras and video records are incapable of getting detailed information of the shapes, surfaces and depth of the objects. But Apple will include series of systems, tools and methods to capture a 3D image and capture its geometric information relating to the surfaces of objects.
4G LTE
Apple CEO Tim Cook said "First-generation LTE chipsets force a lot of design compromises" and thus, was not included in the iPhone 4S.
But now an increasing number of rumors are indicating the iPhone 5 will be LTE support enabled. And, to make the phone LTE enabled, Apple has to accommodate a larger circuit board and a bigger battery making the device a little thicker than its predecessor which of course does not support LTE. According to 9to5mac, iPhone 5 will carry the latest Gobi chips so that the phone supports low-power voice/data on a variety of mobile networks, including China Mobile's TD-LTE.
Better Processor and Better RAM
iPhone 4S features dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 processor with PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, Apple A5 chipset and 512 MB RAM.
Digitimes on Thursday reported that the next iPhone is coming with a new quad-core processor based on Samsung's Exynos 4 ARM architecture.
Some earlier reports claimed that the phone will have A6 processor that will clock in at superfast 1.2 to 1.5 GHz with 1GB RAM to offer amazing processing capabilities to the smartphone. According to 9to5mac, iPhone 5 will feature a new "SGX543RC*" GPU (number of the chip could not be divulged to protect the identity of the source).
Bigger Battery
Currently iPhone 4S Li-Po 1420 mAh battery gives up to 8 hours of talk time on 3G and up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM). Given that iPhone 5 will come with a HD display and powerful apps, it is highly probable that the Cupertino giant will pack in a better battery with it.
Operating System
iPhone 4S runs on Apple's latest iOS 5 operating system while it is expected that iPhone 5 will feature the new iOS 6.0 seed 10A33X with iBoot version iBoot-153x.x. The new OS will add a fifth row of icons and an interface offering views of more content.
Other Features that will give advantage to iPhone 5
- Redesigned back plate
- Unibody construction
- iWallet and Near Field Communication (NFC)
- Face Unlock
- New Dock Plug
- 3D GUI
- Wireless Charging
- Nanotech coating
- Improved Siri
- Apple's new Map app
iPhone 5 Release Date:
While some say iPhone 5 is coming in August or September, some think October 2012 is the most likely iPhone 5 release date.
What do you think? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
