The new iPhone might look just like the old iPhone

We’re just weeks away to the launch of the new iPhone and the rumour-mill have been spinning on hyper-overdrive churning out rumours that are believable, absurd and everything else in between. But how credible are these rumours? Fact of the matter is that almost everything that we know about the new iPhone are still very much unconfirmed and unofficial at the moment.

But despite the clutter, some rumours are more prevalent then others:

• Larger screen but smaller than 4-inch
• Thin and tapered metal body with a cross section that is similar to the MacBook Air
• 8MP camera
• NFC

All these rumours suggest that the new iPhone will feature a new design but is this indeed the case?

Rumours are part and parcel of the Apple fanfare. In fact, you could argue that pre-launch rumours are one of Apple’s most important unofficial marketing tools, but at the end of the day when you look back at the previous device launches you can see that over 70% of these rumours are unfounded. It is very likely that many of the new iPhone will fall on the wayside as well.

This latest buzz surrounding the new iPhone puts a damper on almost of the rumours with an analyst claiming that he has information that indicates that the new iPhone is no more than an updated iPhone 4.

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 5 is going to look very much the same as iPhone 4 right down to the front and back glass panels.

Kuo says that the new iPhone will have the same 3.5-inch screen and the same 512MB RAM as the iPhone 4. The RAM will almost definitely be mated to the 1GHz dual-core Apple A5 processor that is powering the iPad 2. In addition, the upcoming iPhone is expected to have an improved antenna design to address the weaknesses of the current antenna design flaw on the iPhone 4.

Kuo pointed out that although the antenna will be improved, there will be little change to the design of the new iPhone, so much so that users will have a difficult time differentiating the new iPhone with the iPhone 4.

While Kuo’s prediction bucks the trend of what the next-generation iPhone will look like, he agrees with what the rest of the pundits are saying in that the new iPhone will feature a 8MP camera.

In fact, Kuo believes the higher resolution camera is the one of the main reasons why the new iPhone will not have a radically changed design because of the space required to accommodate the apparently larger sensor.

We’ve been following the new iPhone rumours very closely and we have a hunch that Kuo’s prediction is probably one of the more accurate predictions we’ve read. We have nothing solid to back why we feel that the new iPhone will not be a radical departure from the current version but from what we’ve observed, we feel strongly that the new iPhone is most probably going to look very much like the iPhone 4.

Also, we feel that the new iPhone will focus more on software innovation rather than hardware advancements and we fear that in the face of a never-ending barrage of ever more advanced Android device, this might not be enough for Apple to stay at the top of the smartphone pile much longer.

What are your thoughts?

[via]