There’s so much to speculate about this that I can’t even decide where to start. So let’s recap what we know that might be useful.
We know that the iPhone 2.0 software will arrive in late June (slide, iPhone Roadmap event). It seems like a profound waste of effort to launch anything earlier with, say, 1.2 in the meantime, so that brings the earliest iPhone shipment date to June 20th; not only is it far enough into June that it could be considered “late”, it’s also the first Friday of late June, and Apple is fond of big product launches on Fridays. The likely date remains June 27th, which is equally Friday-ish and equally June-ish but even more late-ish.
We know that the new iPhone will have 3G. We even know that it’ll have high-speed 3G; AT&T has been upgrading their network to support HSUPA, and Telstra, a confirmed Australian carrier, committed to the new iPhone supporting 42 mbps speeds [next-generation, “Evolved HSPA”] by Christmas — where “by Christmas” couldn’t logically resolve to anything other than network build-outs instead of a new new iPhone, released in the intermediate term. And we know that, like any half-brained 3G device, you can temporarily turn 3G support off and fall back to GSM-level performance… and battery life.
We know the level of “enterprise support” (read: ActiveSync, Cisco VPN and remote wipe) that we’ll be able to expect. We know, roughly, the proposition for creating iPhone apps. We even know the shape of things to come.
What don’t we know?
Precisely what will 3G support entail? Will we get video calls? (On the one hand, Apple’s well-positioned to turn this from a dud to something moderately interesting due to all their technical work and cultural heritage in audio and video. On the other hand, isn’t mobile video calls fundamentally just a bad idea?) Will surfing and network activity really speed up that much? Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.
Precisely what else will the new iPhone get? With 3G speeds and supposedly improved hardware, maybe we can fill the last square in the 2×2 grid and get video recording; I know Apple could build a better mobile video editor than anyone else. With that in there, is MMS still off the table? There’s been sightings of — cringe — “iControl“, which would be the well-duh way of remotely controlling iTunes playback we’ve all been hoping for since AirPort Express was launched, and even before that.
How about some functionality that, in the same vein as MMS, is already in every other mobile phone? Sending and receiving contacts, photos and perhaps music over bluetooth or email. Maybe a fifth of what the jailbreak software cottage industry produces exists solely to serve these needs. How about being able to edit and create ringtones? We already know that the iTunes Store approach is complete, money-milking bullshit, and that using 30 second snippets to annoy people on the bus is well into fair use. And besides, Apple already supports it… provided that you own a Mac and haven’t uninstalled GarageBand.
We will see at WWDC.