4th iPhoneThis June or thereabouts Apple will release its latest version of the iPhone. Given my contract with ATT is up and I can get the “new” iPhone heavily discounted I’ve been thinking about it lately. I mean I love my jailbroken 3G so much that I doubt I would have bought the 3GS. I mean other than an extra megapixel in the camera it really didn’t offer much of anything I didn’t already have. Yes, it would be nice not to have to SSH to get my video recordings, but that’s really not a big deal. So what about the 4th generation? Well, there are four main things I’m waiting for. First, when is the camera going to be on both the back and front of the iPhone? Video calls and chat will be so cool when this change is made. Sadly, I doubt this is coming anytime soon. I expect the iPad will have a front facing camera before the iPhone. Second, a better camera which will lead to higher quality video recordings. I’m hoping for 5 megapixels at a minimum. This is very likely. Third, a faster processor. Now I’m sure it will have one, but how much faster is hard to say. Unfortunetly, there isn’t a great way to test this. In an ideal world I’d have all the apps on my iPhone 3G installed on a new 4th generation iPhone and then test the time it takes to do a hard reboot, open Tiger Woods golf or my iPhone’s navigation app. Since these are what generally take the longest, I could quickly tell if the performance was faster. I’ll just have to rely on specs :(   Lastly, we need better battery life. Again, without testing it will be hard to know how much the battery has improved, but there is no doubt it needs a little energizing. I’m backgrounding apps more frequently these days and that is a trend that is going to continue. This definitely puts a heavier load on the battery so it needs more juice. In fact, I believe Apple may hold off introducing minimizing apps (backgrounding them) for another year because they are concerned about reduced battery life.

Now when it comes to storage I’m sure Apple will continue its trend and offer two models of the newest iPhone – 32GB and 64GB. Is this necessary? I still can’t fill up 16GB on my 3G. I mean do you really need to store more than 10 hours worth of video or 1000 songs? Now there are numerous software changes that hopefully firmware 4.0 will address. Some of these include allowing everything to run over 3G (I know its ATT too), running multiple apps in the background as I mentioned above and a way to delete all emails at once. Time will tell. What are you hoping for?