9 to 5 Mac has provided some interesting details on what to expect in Apple's fifth generation iPhone, based on information they've received from their sources.
According to 9 to 5 Mac, iPhone 5 will come with Apple's faster A5 chip, 1GB RAM, an improved 8-megapixel camera, Qualcomm Gobi Baseband chips that supports both CDMA and GSM networks. But according to 9 to 5 Mac, iPhone 5's biggest selling point will be a new software feature called Assistant
According to 9 to 5 Mac, here's what we should expect in iPhone 5:
- Powered by Apple's faster dual-core A5 system-on-chip that powers iPad 2 currently, which is twice as fast as iPhone 4's A4 system-on-chip and offers up to 9 times faster graphics
- 1 GB RAM (compared to 512MB RAM in iPhone 4 and iPad 2)
- Improved 8-megapixel camera
- Qualcomm Gobi Baseband chip that supports both CDMA and GSM Networks
- New Assistant feature powered by Siri's artificial intelligence and assistant technology and Nuance's speech recognition technology
- New Dictation feature powered by Nuance's speech recognition technology
Mark Gruman of 9 to 5 Mac also goes on to explain how the Assistant feature will work:
One of the key elements of Assistant is the conversation view. The system will actually speak back and forth with the user to gain the most information in order to provide the best results. The user essentially can hold a conversation with their iPhone like it is another human being. For example, if a user is making a meeting with me, they will say “setup meeting with Mark” and the first “bubble” of the conversation thread will say that. After that, the system will speak back: “which e-mail address should Mark be notified at, work or personal?” This question will both be spoken out loud by the iPhone Assistant and shown as a new “bubble” in the conversation thread. The user will then respond with the email address they want to notify me at, and the appointment will be made. The iPhone will even show a quick glance at a calendar view to confirm the appointment. If the Assistant was sending an SMS, as another example, a mini SMS view would appear so the user has a quick glance at the SMS thread.
The Assistant feature will also work with the rumored Find My Friends feature and also integrate with Wolfram Alpha, which is an online computational knowledge system.
9 to 5 Mac also reports that the new iPhone will come with Nuance speech to text feature:
In addition to Assistant, the new iPhone features Nuance speech-to-text integration , formally called “Dictation,” according to a mobile carrier source familiar with the feature’s extended testing. As expected, the user just taps the microphone icon, speaks, and the speech becomes text. This happens in less than a second in most cases and is unbelievably accurate. The interface for this is also said to be remarkably simple and blends into the design of the iOS 5 Messages application.
We've always been apprehensive about the accuracy of such speech recognition based systems, but according to 9 to 5 Mac sources, the Assistant and Dictation feature provide accurate results:
Assistant is literally like a personal assistant, but in your phone. The speech interpretation is so accurate that users do not even have to speak very clearly or in a slow and robotic tone, according to a source familiar with the software. Users can simply talk how they would usually talk to another person, and the iPhone with Assistant will do its best to interpret the speech and provide accurate results.
9 to 5 Mac aren't sure if Apple will launch a completely redesigned iPhone 5 or an iPhone 4-like model that has been unofficially dubbed iPhone 4S. But according to their sources, the next generation iPhone prototypes that offered the Assistant feature, look like iPhone 4. But as 9 to 5 Mac points out it is difficult to conclude based on that evidence as Apple is known to test iPhone 5 internals in iPhone 4 cases to ensure that they're not noticed during field testing.
What else do you want to see in iPhone 5? Or will you be happy if these new features and improvements make it to iPhone 5?