Talking iPhone: The next generation

As you may have noticed in the past week there has been a cacophony of rumors about the updated version of the iPhone (review). Not only did AT&T's CEO hint at it obliquely by stating that their entire lineup of smart phones would be 3G in a matter of months, but luminaries like Walt Mossberg are also fairly convinced that this will be happening. Of course the feature that everyone is focused on is support for high speed 3G networks. As you may have gathered from our recent article on why 3G sucks this isn't exactly a compelling update for us, but there are a lot of other hardware changes we'd like to see on the iPhone that we'll be taking a look at today.

A better camera: the iPhone is a high end device that competes with phones like Nokia's N82 (review) and the AT&T Tilt (review). One thing that currently distinguishes the high end of other devices from the iPhone are their cameras. The N82 has a five megapixel auto-focus camera while the Tilt sports a 3 megapixel camera. The iPhone's camera, by contrast, is two megapixels and fixed focus. Given those specs the iPhone's camera actually performed rather well in our tests, but you simply can't beat an auto-focus camera and we'd like the additional megapixels too please. In the next generation of the iPhone we want to see at least a three megapixel camera with auto-focus, if not a five megapixel camera to compete with the high end of Nokia's device lineup and Sony Ericsson's Cybershot phones. Oh, and while we're at it please add a shutter key as well.

Move the antenna to the top: One of the challenges we've faced with the iPhone is that reception is not the greatest. The principal culprit for this is the placement of the cellular antenna at the bottom of the device, as is made clear in this excellent Gizmodo story. In the next generation of the iPhone we'd like to see the antenna moved to the top of the device to improve reception. We understand that the reason Apple placed the antenna at the bottom of the device is to avoid interference from RF with the headset jack, but while we're at it we'd like to see the jack moved to the bottom of the device too, just cuz we like it better that way. Frankly, though, we'd take a little interference in exchange for better reception.

GPS: Another feature that is appearing on high-end devices is GPS. Steve Jobs has already said that the iPhone will eventually support GPS and we say the time is now. If you've ever used the "locate me" feature on the iPhone and gotten a circle that encompasses a whole county you know that there's no replacement for real GPS. Google Maps on other platforms already supports GPS functionality and it would be an easy addition to make to the iPhone. We'd also like the option to install alternative mapping programs with locally stored maps. Garmin and Tom-Tom make GPS software for other smart phones and once the iPhone gets GPS we're sure that they'll do so for the iPhone as well. This is important for cross country trips where you're not always in range of the cellular network to download maps on the fly. How good would the iPhone look mounted on your dashboard as your in-car GPS device? Yeah, we think so too.

Better Bluetooth Support: The iPhone's current Bluetooth implementation is very limited, basically you can use a mono headset or pair with a hands-free car kit, but that's about it. Bluetooth can provide users far more functionality. We'd like to see things like support for stereo Bluetooth headphones, bluetooth GPS dongles (if we don't get built-in GPS) and perhaps Bluetooth printing, amongst others. Once again other high-end devices are far ahead of the iPhone in this area with support for a dozen or more Bluetooth profiles on phones like the Nokia N95 (review).

Larger capacity battery: The iPhone's battery life is actually pretty reasonable, but with the looming advent of 3G we're sure it's going to take a hit, as we explain in this article. Add a more powerful camera, GPS and stereo Bluetooth and you'll have a lot of users annoyed that they won't be able to get through a day unless the battery capacity is improved. Some rumors have indicated the Apple is looking to slim down the iPhone a bit in the next generation, and frankly we'd be happy to sacrifice this for a larger capacity battery. At the very least there's no way it should be sporting a smaller battery than the first version

There you go, these are our top hardware upgrades for the next generation iPhone. We'll see if Apple's thinking along the same lines within a couple of months, so just hold on.