Nothing like a good rumor to start the day, Business Insider has reportedly talked to a source who has had hands on with the iPhone 5. The prototype had a bigger screen than the current iPhone with a 4″ diagonal increasing the size by 0.5 inches.
The rumor among Apple employees is that Steve Jobs was unhappy with the bigger screen because it “fragmented” iPhones. If they changed the screen size this would bring in line with the Android ecosystem which has a variety of manufactures making different sized handsets.
Gizmodo sums up why, for non-technical reasons this rumor could be true:
We know what Jobs worshipped: minimalism and uniformity were chief among them. So to create a branch in the iPhone family—many with smaller screens, one with a larger display—would be to end the lineage’s uniformity. The phones wouldn’t resemble each other. Apps wouldn’t look the same from a 4 to a 5. And most poignantly, the seal would’ve been broken; Apple would have signed off on differing designs, opening an aesthetic future of variance upon variance. A Jobsian nightmare.
Business Insider also had a few other specific design rumors to go long with the larger one that Steve Jobs acutally killed the iPhone. The new phones were supposed to have aluminum backs like the iPad 2 and was meant to incorperate “liquid metal” technology to make colored iPhones. Liquid Metal is like paint made out of aluminum, full-saturated with color. Scratch it, and the color remains. Also the prototype’s home button “was not a physical press button. You could touch it and hold it and physically reboot the device.” And finally the iPhone 5 was “squished” and “flatter” just like the pictures on the Internet guessed.
True or not Apple is going to have to release the iPhone 5 in 2012, so we’ll have our answer soon enough.
Source Business Insider
