Recently rumors about the next generation iPhone starts to be active, a 4.6 inches screen, LTE, etc. iMore gives their analysis based on their sources, suggesting the iPhone 5 will most likely to have 3.5-Inch Display, LTE and Micro Dock Connector.

"First, the new iPhone will be 4G LTE compatible. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, considering the new iPad supports LTE and it’s hard to imagine Apple giving the iPad a feature like that and not passing it on to the iPhone. So look for that this fall.

Second is the timeframe. We’ve mentioned October 2012 as the current release schedule for iPhone 5,1 before and that’s still the plan. The exact date won’t be determined until closer to launch, but the iPhone is locked to a fall cycle for the immediate future.

That makes sense for a number of reasons. While going from the iPhone 4 in June 2010 to the iPhone 4S in October 2011 was a longer wait than previous generations, a new iPhone release in June of 2012 would create the opposite problem — only 9 months between iPhones. That’s not dissimilar to the period of time between the Verizon iPhone 4 launch in February of 2011 and the cross-carrier iPhone 4S launch in October of the same year, but that was a unique circumstance. Apple has shown they can earn significant revenue on their flagship devices even when they’ve been on the market for over a year. Why unnecessarily shorten that shelf life?

Also, to date, every new iPhone has been launched alongside a new version of iOS. The last version, iOS 5, was a major, ambitious update, including iCloud and Siri, and Apple made good use of those 16 months to bring it to market. We have no specific information on how large an update Apple is planning for iOS 6, but 9 months doesn’t sound like a lot of time for even a modest release. If Apple announces an iOS 6 SDK event this spring, like they did from 2008 to 2010, then we may start getting an idea. If iOS 6 isn’t introduced to developers until WWDC, presumably in the summer like 2011, then a fall release would seem a certainty."

So, the iPhone 5,1, as it is being called, will have:

    • Similar if not same sized screen (currently 3.5-inch but not set in stone)

    • 4G LTE radio

    • New “micro dock” connector

    • Fall/October 2012 release

iMore has predicted this tinier dock connector before, and it certainly makes sense: within the iPhone, every millimeter needs to count, and the dock connector takes up a huge amount of real estate within the handset. An Apple dock equivalent to micro USB would be a much more efficient use of space, but it would also cause backwards compatibility problems with a legion of accessories.

What do you think?

via cultofmac via iMore