Diehard fans will buy the new iPhone, regardless of what Apple will announce on Tuesday, but unless the refresh is more substantial than expected, the company will have to work harder to fend off stiff competition from Android.
Anecdotal evidence in advance of Tuesday's scheduled iPhone unveiling indicates Apple's newest model will look exactly like the iPhone 4 on the outside, with bumped-up specs on the inside. If that’s the case, Android phones are already ahead of the curve.
Three main improvements are expected in the new model: a faster dual-core processor, likely the A5 chip used in the iPad 2; more RAM -- 1GB up from 512MB; and an 8-megapixel camera, improved from 5 megapixels in the iPhone 4. Motorola’s Droid Bionic has all that plus 4G connectivity for fast data transfers, while the Samsung Galaxy S II has an even faster processor (1.2GHz dual-core). The incoming iPhone seems to be merely catching up with Android handsets that were launched earlier this year.
iOS 5, the next version of the mobile OS powering iPhones and iPads, is also mostly a feature catch-upwith Google’s Android OS. As with Android, iOS 5 users won’t need to be connected to a PC to update the software on their phone. Also similar to Android, iOS 5 will feature a notification drawer and browser tabs. Other features such as the iMessage service are already found on BlackBerry phones.
