The wait is almost over. Come Monday’s keynote at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, odds are we’ll get a look — perhaps not the first, after all those crazy leaks — of the next iPhone, complete (supposedly) with a new, flatter shell, dual cameras, and a higher-resolution display. But what else will Steve Jobs pull out of his bag of tricks?

Fourth-generation iPhone
Barring a jaw-dropping surprise from Apple, we’ve probably already seen the new iPhone, thanks in part to a hapless Apple engineer who lost a prototype (or had it stolen from his backpack, depending on whom you believe) a couple of months ago. Gizmodo paid a $5,000 finder’s fee to publish detailed photos and videos of the handset in a series of blog posts. Additional snapshots from another purported leaked iPhone later surfaced in Vietnam.

The handset they documented would represent the most radical change in the iPhone’s form factor since the original iPhone debuted in 2007. The curved back of the iPhone 3GS would be  replaced with a smooth, flat ceramic shell, complete with flat aluminum edges and buttons.

Also new, according to the bloggers who poked and prodded the prototypes: a revamped, higher-resolution display (960 by 640, to be exact, or twice the resolution of the original iPhone), dual cameras (one in back with a flash, the other in front, apparently for video chat), a version of Apple’s new A4 processor (the same one that powers the iPad), and a larger battery. The phone is also thinner than the iPhone 3GS, but slightly heavier than the current 4.8-ounce model, the bloggers said.

That’s what we (think we) know. What we don’t yet know is how much the new iPhone will cost or what storage capacities will be available. The 32GB iPhone 3GS goes for $299 with a new, two-year AT&T contract; the 16GB version sells for $199 with service. Will Apple stick to $299 as the upper end of its price range, and will it double the capacity of the priciest iPhone (to 64GB, in this case) as it has in years past? Will the current $99 8GB iPhone 3G be phased out? We’ll have to wait and see.

Other question marks: the exact resolution of the new camera(s); whether and how AT&T will support video chat, assuming the front-facing camera is the real McCoy; whether the iPhone is coming to other carriers, namely Verizon (maybe eventually, but probably not Monday); the precise day when the next iPhone goes on sale; and what the new iPhone will end up being called. (The iPhone HD? 4G? Something else?)

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com

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