Yesterday saw the return of the prestigeous John Smith's Grand National. As punters and spectators alike gathered for the great event filled with anticipation and expectation, in typical Grand National fashion, things didn't quite go as the nation's majority would of foreseen or hoped! This was due to the 66-1 long-shot, Auroras Encore, ridden by Ryan Mania and trained
by Sue Smith, won the 2013 AintreeGrand National with what appeared to be quite some ease. Favourites such as 'On His Own' and of course 'Seabass' were no where to be seen as Aurora approached the finishing post in a result that would of had most of the countries bookies jumping for joy.
However, after what must of been a pinnacle moment in the winning jockey Ryan Mania's life who was riding Auroras Encore on Saturday, less than 24 hours later was airlifted to hospital with neck and back injuries following a fall in a
hurdle race at Hexham. The shocking news though must take nothing away from the pair's remarkable performance yesterday, that would of made a fair few punters who favour 'the outside bet' a value sixty six times their original stake.
Needless to say, the day offered all the suspense, atmosphere & surprise that it never fails to deliver and once again proved itself as one of the most unpredictable & unique sporting occasions in the world. Well that sums up this year's Grand National, we can only hope you had more luck than us if you backed a horse, but if not, there's always next year.
The browser wars are back – but this time on mobile as well as the desktop. After long-simmering disagreements with engineers at Apple, Google has split its development of the Chrome browser's rendering engine for both desktop and mobile from the main line of the open source WebKit project.
That creates a "fork" in the engine which will put it on an increasingly divergent path from other WebKit developers, including Apple, Nokia, and BlackBerry.
For users, growing differences in how the rendering engines work could mean that viewing the same site with different browsers will give different results – especially on mobile.
Google is calling its new rendering engine "Blink" – and admits in a blogpost that "we know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web."
But it adds that it thinks that having multiple rendering engines – the programs that decide how to lay out pages – "will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem." The move means there are now four main rendering engines online: WebKit, Blink, Trident (used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer) and Gecko, used by Mozilla.
Rendering engines figure out how to interpret the HTML, CSS and Javascript that makes up a page, and decide how to lay out the page. They're the essential subsystem for a browser, onto which elements such as navigation, bookmarking, tabs and so on are overlaid to produce the finished app.
The move follows long-simmering disagreement between engineers at Apple and Google over the best way to develop the rendering engine underlying the browser – with one senior Apple engineer saying that Google refused to incorporate key technologies into the main branch of WebKit, keeping them instead for Chrome.
But Google argues that its move means innovation in its browsers can advance more quickly, and independently, without being held back by legacy code.
In the blogpost, it says it will remove seven "build systems" and 7,000 files comprising more than 4.5m lines of code. "Over the long term, a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs," writes Adam Barth, Google's software engineer.
For web designers who will have to design pages that work with even more rendering engines, the divergence could mean growing problems. Similar troubles occurred early in the development of the commercial web, when Microsoft and Netscape produced their own non-standard adaptations – such as Netscape's addition of the "blink" tag, which was not adopted by Microsoft.
At present, Apple's MobileSafari is the most-used on mobile, according to Net Applications' measurement of visits to sites – despite the greater number of Android phones in use. Statcounter puts the Android browser as the most-used, as 30% against MobileSafari's 24%.
Google is presently rolling out updates to Android which replace the Android "Browser" app with Chrome in newer versions of Android released in the past two years.
Apple is not the only company using WebKit. In February, Norway's Opera stopped trying to develop its own rendering engine and joined the WebKit group. This week, it said it will use Blink.
Forks in open source projects are generally irreversible, because the two paths introduce differences in coding and features which are irreconcilable. For that reason, those behind such projects usually make strenuous efforts to avoid them – unless those involved have seriously divergent aims for the project.
The split has come after tensions between engineers from Apple and Google, which have played out on the WebKit mailing lists following disagreements on how WebKit should develop to support "multi-process" functionality in a browser. Google's branch of WebKit, used for its Chrome browser, has supported multi-process for a long time – but the company has repeatedly refused to integrate that into the main branch of WebKit, which would have made it available to all the companies and organisations that use WebKit, including Apple, Nokia and BlackBerry.
That refusal seems to have persuaded Apple's team, which has been core to the development of WebKit since using it for the Safari browser, released in January 2003, to introduce WebKit2 earlier this year which did offer that capability. Crucially, though, none of Google's engineers was given "commit" powers to WebKit2 – meaning they could not incorporate changes into the main branch.
In effect, the fork creates a mobile version of the "browser wars" of the 1990s, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer took on the then-dominant Netscape Navigator, and won – though Microsoft was later fined under antitrust laws for the tactics that it used, where it used its dominance in Windows to strongarm PC makers not to install Navigator.
The tensions are clear in a Hacker News discussion between Maciej Stachowiak of Apple's Safari group, who has long been one of the WebKit team (using the handle othermaciej) and Justin Schuh (justinschuh) of Google's Chrome security team.
Stachowiak says:
The main reason we built a new multiprocess architecture is that Chromium's multiprocess support was never contributed to the WebKit project. It has always lived in the separate Chromium tree, making it pretty hard to use for non-Chrome purposes.
Before we wrote a single line of what would become WebKit2, we directly asked Google folks if they would be willing to contribute their multiprocess support back to WebKit, so that we could build on it. They said no.
At that point, our choices were to do a hostile fork of Chromium into the WebKit tree, write our own process model, or live with being single-process forever. (At the time, there wasn't really an API-stable layer of the Chromium stack that packaged the process support.)
Writing our own seemed like the least bad approach.
If Google had upstreamed (integrated into WebKit) their multiprocess support, we almost surely would have built on it. And history might have turned out differently.
He adds that "we talked privately with particular Chrome folks before we started [WebKit2], in the middle [of development], and shortly before landing to mention that we were landing soon. I don't know if the contents of these conversations were ever shared with the whole Chrome team as some Chrome people seemed super surprised at our announcement [of WebKit2]."
But Justin Schuh, who works for Google on its Chrome security team, argued that the multiprocess source was available to be integrated – but that the WebKit team didn't incorporate it.
Alex Russell, one of the Chrome team, insisted in a personal blogpostthat the key intention of the move is to speed up the time it takes to compile and test new versions of the code. "To make a better platform faster, you must be able to iterate faster," Russell says. "Today's WebKit defeats that imperative in ways large and small. It's not anybody's fault, but it does need to change."
He says that the decision to split from the WebKit team was "wrenching" but that "in all honesty, we may have paid too high a price for too long because of this desire to stay close to WebKit."
Apple adopted WebKit2 in April 2010, announcing the move on the WebKit mailing list. "The major difference [from Google Chrome] being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other [browser] clients to use it," wrote Apple's Anders Carlsson at the time. A split process system can use the multiple cores in modern processors, among other advantages.
At the time, some found it controversial – though Stachowiak said then that the naming "seems to make this project seem a bigger deal than it is." He called it a "proof of concept".
Wiping away your digital life means getting rid of the traces you've left – the mistakes you made, the embarrassing photos, the unwise comments, the flawed social media profiles where you've left too much visible.
But how easy is that? The following steps provide a start to reducing your digital footprint and taking back control of your online life.
1) If you have a Facebook account, change every setting in the Privacytabs to "private" or "not shared" or "off" (there's a special "privacy settings" shortcut in the blue bar near the top).
2) Find out what photos you're tagged in on Facebook. These should appear in the Photos tab on the left hand side. If you hover over the picture, a star and a pencil appear in the top right. Choose "Report/remove tag" and pick "I want to untag myself" from the list.
3) If you have a Google Blogger account, delete your profile there. That means that blogposts or comments you've made there will vanish.
4) If you've got a Tumblr or Wordpress blog, delete that too.
Now start using a search engine, and begin searching on your name (put the first name and surname together in quotes; this works in pretty much all search engines to identify that as a phrase you're after). Note that some sites, such as newspapers, generally won't agree to removing your name if you've appeared in a news or other story.
5) If you've posted in forums, go back and see if you can delete your posts. If you can't, try asking the administrators of the sites (nicely) if they can remove your post. Have a very good reason. You should always bear in mind the Streisand effect, which can have the reverse effect – spreading what you don't want to draw notice to around theinternet, with the equivalent of a klaxon attached to it. (In 2003 the singer Barbra Streisand tried to remove some aerial pictures of her California beach house from a collection, via a lawsuit. The outcry meant the pictures were more widely spread, rather than the reverse.)
6) Remove any photos you've added to sites such as Flickr or, of course, Facebook. Try searching on your name in Google Images (put quotes around your name) and see what comes up: then visit those sites and ask if they would remove the photos. Again, be aware of the Streisand effect.
7) Keep doing searches on your name and finding out what turns up, and getting in touch with the owners of the sites. Be prepared to get rebuffed, especially if the site is in the US.
8) Be aware that anything that you've posted outside Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress might still live on in the Internet Archive – which aims to crawl the entire web again and again and store what it finds, for ever. The Internet Archive doesn't have an explicit way to remove sites once they're in its index – which is colossal. And as it sees itself as a repository of the web, which would otherwise be short-lived. It does take a case-by-case approach to requests for removal.
9) Be aware too that even if you remove explicit mentions of your name, a determined searcher may be able to dig up your past through leftover postings and hints of whatever sort. Mentions by other people, photos where even though you're not tagged, you're mentioned in related information.
In this, we've not taken the more extensive move of deleting your Google web search history – though if you don't want to be (silently) tracked by Google, then stop using Google's search (there are plenty of other search engines that won't track you, such as DuckDuckGo.com or Blekko.com. DuckDuckGo is improving all the time, and saw a big jump in traffic with the change in Google's privacy policies last year.
Expunging yourself from the internet is very, very hard. As far as is known, nobody's succeeded – though of course if they had, how would we know?
What other tips, links and suggestions do you have for reducing your digital footprint? Do you think it should be easy for people to airbrush their digital footprint? Leave your ideas and views in the thread below.
CHECK OUT A HOW TO VIDEO http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2013/apr/05/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet-video
A reader gives his views on the impact of smartphones and tablets on gaming, and suggests that a digital-only future is not necessarily a bad one.
Is the extinction of physical media really a bad thing?
Andy_b720 made some interesting points in his feature a few weeks ago. I do however think he has underestimated companies like Microsoft and Sony, who are probably well prepared for the dramatic changes in the industry which are happening right now.
Reading through the Underbox of andy_b720′s feature made it clear that a lot of people only want to play games if they can have a physical device sitting under their TV which plays physical media games. Maybe a lot of these people took his suggestion towards tablet or phone gaming to mean actually solely playing a game on the touchscreen of one of these devices. I didn’t.
Within the next several years it will be probably be possible to have a phone size device as powerful as the next generation of consoles sitting in your pocket streaming games to your TV. You will be able to control these games with a standard controller that will be wirelessly linked to your phone and whilst in play the experience will be no different to playing a game on a home console from a Blu-ray or DVD. What’s more is that these games will still be Xbox and PlayStation games.
This isn’t some random hypothesis, simply the logical progression of technology based on exactly what has happened since the first computer was birthed.
Computer technology has always and will always get faster, smaller and more streamlined. It will continue to converge, it will become more accessible and change to suit the needs and lifestyles of the people who use it.
Physical media will eventually disappear because it is simply more convenient to not have to physically buy, store and use a disc or cartridge.
I currently use Blu-rays to watch my movies. This is because I’m obsessed with picture and sound quality. I could (pay to) download or stream a film to my laptop and connect it to my TV but I don’t because my laptop’s video card won’t process 1080p video at quite the same quality as my Blu-ray player. Most people I know though think I’m mad and quite happily watch new releases streamed or downloaded in frankly awful quality and it doesn’t seem to bother them one iota.
So try telling one of these people that one day they might have to download or stream the next Call Of Duty or FIFA and not have a physical copy to keep or sell on. Their reply will probably be, ‘So what?’
People will even argue that the decline of physical media is an attempt to stamp out second-hand sales. It’s not, the death of second-hand sales will be more of an unintentional by-product of the move away from physical media. I’m not saying it won’t have positive repercussions for publishers and negative ones for consumers, just that these are not the reason a downloadable future is happening. It is simply because technology is, almost of its own accord, moving to fit the needs of the consumers who make up the greatest percentage of its revenue.
Now this is not me saying I’m happy to lose the ability to sell my games on. I wasn’t happy to have to pay for a DVD player and buy movies I already owned when DVDs came out. I’m sure thousands of people who worked in the VCR production industry lost their jobs. But it wasn’t an evil plot by sinister corporations that did this, just side effects of the inevitable transition from one technology to another.
For the last few years people have tried to compare the sale of games to cars. That people would be outraged if they couldn’t sell a car on. Last time I checked cars cost thousands of pounds and are made to last years. Games cost between £20 and £40 new and most go down to around £10 after a year or so. If cars could be downloaded and only cost a fraction of what they do I’m sure people would be happy enough to buy new each time.
But that day will never come, there will never be the equivalent of a download in the car industry so it’s a ridiculous comparison to make. People are not being robbed of the right to sell their game on rather simply losing the ability to sell it on as a new form of media takes over.
The way I see things going is that Sony and Microsoft’s next generation platform won’t be limited to the physical consoles they announce/have announced this year. Microsoft are already playing with SmartGlass technology and I’m betting with the NextBox any screen-based device will be able to be used as an alternative to your TV, Wii U style, for when the TV is in use. Sony still haven’t even showed a physical console and maybe that’s because this generation won’t always require one.
With the current Xbox you can already access your Live account from your phone. I’m assuming the next one will allow you to go even further. Whilst it might not be available from the get go I’d like to think that all you’ll need to play games in the future would be a wireless controller, access to a tablet device or Internet-enabled TV and an account with Sony or Microsoft’s online service. We could still have the physical console under our TV at home but as the generation moves on and the online service becomes more reliable this will become less and less of a necessity.
People will bemoan the reliability of such structures based on the relative unreliability of today’s Internet speeds. I’ve said it before that within the next decade Internet will be just as reliable as your electricity source and so fast they’ll stop even talking about speeds anymore. Already people I know have 4G capable mobiles which stream Internet to their whole house many times faster than my own home broadband.
So rather than the death of home consoles that andy_b720 predicts I think it will be more of a case of the home console becoming invisible. Sony and Microsoft will no longer need to make expensive machines and ship them around the world. They’ll keep that technology in their own HQs and just sell us controllers and online subscriptions. The industry won’t crash because enough people want to play games, big blockbuster games but it will shed its reliability on home-owned technology. This if anything might even make the industry more sustainable from a financial point of view.
There are many things I’ll miss if we eventually move away from the physicality of game and console ownership. I’ll tell my children of the joy of game stores, the smell of instruction books, the endless hours trying to get the cellophane of a new game. I’ll tell them how wonderful it was to unbox a new console, to set it up and sense its power under the TV. I’ll lament about how my shelves used to be filled with rows of games making it easier to show of my manly geekiness to any guests.
There are a lot of things that will make me miss the way things were. But I don’t think I’ll miss them as much as I enjoy playing games themselves. Because that’s what matters to me, playing games. If I’m enjoying the experience I’m far too busy to be thinking about how I bought the game, what technology is powering it or whether I’ll be able to sell it on afterwards. If the game is good, the graphics are great and the controller works well then nothing else really matters to me.
The Harlem Shake is an Internet meme in the form of a video in which a group of people perform a comedy sketch accompanied by a short excerpt from the song "Harlem Shake". As a meme, the video was replicated by many people, using the same concept, and this rapidly led to it becoming viral in early February 2013, with thousands of "Harlem Shake" videos being made and uploaded to YouTubeevery day at the height of its popularity.
The form of the meme was established in a video uploaded on February 2 by five teenagers from Queensland, Australia known on YouTube as The Sunny Coast Skate.The video started a viral trend of people uploading their own "Harlem Shake" videos to YouTube. The teenagers' video was a follow-up to a video by a YouTube comedy vlogger named Filthy Frank which featured a section where several costumed people danced to the song "Harlem Shake" by Baauer.
Viral spread...
On February 10, the upload rate of Harlem Shake videos reached 4,000 per day. As of February 11, about 12,000 versions of the popular Internet meme had been uploaded to YouTube, garnering over 44 million unique views. By February 15, about 40,000 Harlem Shake videos had been uploaded, totalling 175 million views.
Harlem Shake hit the 1 billion view mark on March 24, 2013, just 40 days after its first upload, according to Visible Measures. From the day when the first video was uploaded until it hit 1 billion views, the videos were accumulating an average of more than 20 million views a day. The time it took for Harlem Shake to hit 1 billion views is half the time Gangnam Style took hit 1 billion views and almost a sixth of the time that it took Call Me Maybe. On April 4, Harlem Shake had 1.21 billion views.
Baauer's single reached #1 on the iTunes America chart and #2 on iTunes in the UK and Australia on February 15, 2013.
The Harlem Shake meme has spread in many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and much of Europe, Russia and Eastern Europe,China,India,Latin America, the United Arab Emirates,and Jamaica.
Best of Harlem Shake Videos 2013
NEWS FLASH... Harlem Shake at MMU
FIRST year Advertising and Brand Management students got their latest project to a worldwide audience with a little help from Lord Alan Sugar this week.
The students had been tasked with creating and sharing a promotional video as part of their Digital Media and Marketing Platform unit.
Taking to Twitter to market a link to their video, the students got a personal retweet from Lord Alan Sugar’s Twitter account, sharing the video with his 2.8 million followers worldwide.
Brendan Keegan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, said: “Around 2.8milllion Twitter users worldwide will have had this video posted in front of them and it soon became evident that the number of viewings rose dramatically.
Competing for views
“There were 17,000 views within 18 hours from the Sir Alan’s tweet - some pretty impressive statistics which we have never seen the like of in past video projects like this.”
The original task was to create an ‘Unboxing’ video - a style of promotional video that displays the unpacking of new products by an expert. The whole process is captured on video with a commentary and is uploaded to the Internet so that viewers can experience opening the new product for themselves.
This year, students were set the challenge of unboxing a Kinder Egg, meaning they had no knowledge of what was inside. The teams were then encouraged to compete with each other to get the highest number of views on their YouTube videos for which there would be a prize presented at the final lecture at the end of term.
Seems like all MMU have gone Harlem Shake Crazy!!!
iPhone 6 release date, rumours and leaked images article, here we plan to do everything that the title suggests. We are going to bring you everything we know about the new iPhone 6 release date so you can know exactly when the new iPhone 6 is coming out. Updated 28 March 2013
Also we are going to bring you a few of the juiciest spec rumours that are flying round the web's most trusted iPhone websites too. Finally, we've got some iPhone images that we'd like to show you. So sit back and relax: we've got the new iPhone 6 covered.
As this is Apple, the iPhone 6 is not officially announced yet. But Apple is not as secure as it'd like to be, and there are many juicy iPhone 6 rumours floating around, and some of the iPhone leaks in the past have turned out to be fairly accurate.
Having said that, a lot of iPhone 6 rumours turn out to be Chinese whispers or plain attempts to test people's gullibility.
New iPhone 6 release date
There are two main theories regarding the iPhone 6 launch date. One is that it'll come six months after the iPhone 5, the second is that it'll come 12 months after the iPhone 5.
The first iPhone 6 release date rumour is that Apple has now moved to a six-month cycle for it's iOS products, and the iPhone 6 release date will be March 2013, alongside an iPad 5. Ed Valdez at Technoarti suggests that Apple is moving to a six month cycle.
Valdez gives six reasons, but they're pretty lame. Such as "Apple needs a wow factor", "Apple needs to lead against Samsung" and "The bulk of iPhone sales take place int he first three to four months after its release". Bear in mind that Apple launched the iPhone 5 in Korea and 50 other countries in December 2012. So it doesn't just launch in the US and then that's it, the iPhone rollout moves across the globe.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has correctly predicted Apple product launches in the past, thinks that Apple's iPhone 6 will be unveiled in June, alongside a low-cost plastic and fibreglass iPhone.
The second theory is that Apple will stick to its late-season launch and the iPhone 6 release date will be October 2013. This is what we'd currently bet on, although the amount of iPhone 6 rumours and iPhone 6 image leaks in the run-up to June may change the situation.
The six-month cycle for iOS products makes sense because it means Apple can always be using the latest chipsets and technology. But it's based on the rapid deployment on the iPad 4, just six months after the iPad 3: it's a bit of an assumption that Apple is planning to do this to every product from now on. Research shows that most people buy a new iPhone ever two years, so releasing a new model every six months doesn't mean Apple will sell more, or even make more iPhones, just design more. Apple is rumoured to be selling up to 53 million iPhones in the December quarter alone.
In March, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said that the new iPhone has been delayed from its June or July launch to a September launch due to supplier issues with new colour cases (see iPhone 6 to have eight colour options rumour below).
Apple is already making the iPhone 6
Apple's iPhone 6 and iOS 7 have been spotted in app usage logs by developers, suggesting that the release date will be earlier in 2013 rather than later. The iPhone 5 is identified in appusage logs as 'iPhone 5,1' and 'iPhone 5,2' depending on which 4G LTE it uses, so the new 'iPhone 6,1' identifier is believed to be Apple's next generation model.
In February, both an iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 were reportedly spotted at Apple's suppliers by a source who claims that both smartphones will launch this year.
There are a lot of iPhone 6 rumours around, but because it is so close from the launch of the iPhone 5 it is hard to distinguish what is a specific iPhone 6 rumour, from general Apple iPhone rumours. Some rumours that were attached to the iPhone 5 are now being incorporated into the iPhone 6. SEE: iPhone 6 rumour rollup for 2013's first week
iPhone 6 to have eight colour options and three screen sizes
Apple's iPhone 6 could be available in three different sizes, with up to eight different colour options, an analyst has predicted.
Topeka Capital analyst Brian White said that Apple wants to introduce new colours and sizes in order to give its customers more choice with the same high quality, in order to further expand its market share in the smartphone world.
A previous report from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek also suggested that Apple would be introducing the iPhone 6 in six to eight colours, with what he calls a 'Retina+ display, NFC, and 128GB of storage.
An Apple job listing spotted in March has also added evidence to the theory that Apple will launch the iPhone 6 in multiple colours. Apple is searching for an Anodizing Engineer to join the Manufacturing Design team to help create the next-generation Apple products.
The iPhone 6 will have a Smart Home Button that is oblong-shaped and touch-capacitive
This one's been around since forever (well, early 2011 at least). One iPhone 6 rumour suggests that Jony Ive (or Sir Jonathan Ive as he's now formally known) is ready to introduce a wider oblong home button that will be touch-capacitive. The iPhone 6 Home Button will not just push to return to the Home Screen, but you'll be able to swipe your finger left and right over it (we presume to move left and right between Apps, like the four-finger Multi-Touch gesture that you find on the iPad).
This iPhone 6 rumour has some basis in fact, and we believe Apple has at least been experimenting with this idea (we have been reporting on it for a while).
The iPhone 6 will launch alongside an 'iPhone Math' with 4.8in display
While we're rather dubious about the name, it is possible that Apple is thinking about launching an iPhone with a bigger display in order to compete with rival 'phablet' devices such as Samsung's Galaxy Note.
The iPhone 6 will have a built-in fingerprint sensor
Trusted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities has predicted that Apple's next iPhone will have largely the same chassis as the iPhone 5, with the only difference to the body of the device expected to be a fingerprint sensor that is built-in to the home button.
The rumoured iPhone 6 fingerprint sensor could spell trouble for competitors though, says Kuo, who believes that rivals will have more difficulty than Apple when it comes to introducing a fingerprint sensor to their Android and Windows Phone devices, because many have more than one button below the display. This means fingerprint scanners in iPhone rivals would be less intutitive for the user, and could cause frustration, Kuo added.
In March, it was reported that Taiwanese chip maker Chipbond could be providing Apple with components for its next-generation iPhone, including parts that would be used to introduce a fingerprint sensor and near field communications (NFC) features to the upcoming iPhone.
The iPhone 6 will be an iPhone 5S
One iPhone 6 rumour is that it will be an iPhone 5S and actually be a pretty small update. Visually it will be identical to the iPhone 5, with its larger 4in display, Lightning port and thinner case.
Since the iPhone 3G, Apple has consistently launched a model one year, then the same model but upgraded next year with the 'S' for 'Speed' moniker. So it seems a good bet that the iPhone 6 will be an iPhone 5S with the same case.
Some analysts, like Paul Brown at Strategy Analytics seems to think so: "On the back of a lack of recent innovation from Apple and negative press, we are starting see growth in the number of previously highly-loyal customers who are considering whether or not they will purchase a new iPhone for their next device."
This does seem to overlook the fact that Apple will almost certainly introduce new iOS 6 features in the iPhone 6 along with faster internal components, even if it does have the same external case.
Will the iPhone 6 use sonar for face detection and 3D modelling?
Analysis of recent Apple patent activity has got our minds whirring. It seems Apple plans to build audio detection into the screens of some of its future devices, which may include the iPhone 6, and has also patented a system for using sonar for proximity detection.
An Apple patent has hinted at an advanced camera that uses depth perception technology to capture better photographs could be on its way with the next iPhone too.
Apple has taken out several patents on a Smart Bezel (the plastic front surrounding the screen). In other words the Bezel will be able to display information as well as the screen. We've reported on the iPhone 6 Smart Bezel a few times, and Patently Apple, the source of many an Apple rumour has this article on the latest Apple patent on a Smart Bezel.
In Apple's own words: "The primary display could be used to convey visual content to a user, and the secondary display could be used to guide a user providing inputs to the device. For example, the secondary display could be selectively illuminated to provide one or more indicators that represent where or how a user can provide inputs to the device."
What kind of level of information the Smart Bezel could display is up for debate. It certainly wouldn't be a 'screen extension', more like flashing buttons and symbols. This could guide users to tap parts of the screen, or indiciate new messages and suchlike.
The iPhone 6 will have an A6X processor
Apple traditionally updates the iPhone with a new internal procoessor. The iPhone currently has a A6 processor, while the latest iPad has an A6X. That seems like a fair candidate for the next generation of iPhone CPU. The A6X is a dual-core CPU with a quad-core GPU. Veruss the A6 which is a dual-core CPU with three graphics cores.
Giving an additional graphics core to the iPhone might not make much difference to performance, however (it's required on the iPad to power the Retina Display).
iPhone 6 will have A7 quad-core processor
The iPhone is typically ahead of the curve when it comes to performance. And Apple could skip the dual-core A6X and go straight to the A7, which would possibly be quad-core CPU and quad-core graphics.
Of course, given Apple's track record this would only happen if the A7 processor did not impinge on heat dissapation, battery life, or device bulk (all of which Apple is fanatical about).
But let's assume it can. What would the iPhone do with all this power? Aside from more powerful games, it could be used to power more iOS features, although everybody seems to struggle with ideas for what.
Apple's patents indicate that the company is exploring legal safeguards for a flexible design, but it looks like Samsung has pipped it to the post, showing off its flexible smartphone displays during the 2013 CES in Las Vegas in January.
iPhone 6 will have tougher Gorilla Glass 3 display
Corning has developed a new version of its Gorilla Glass for smartphones and tablets that it says will result in 40 per cent fewer scratches and appear in devices later this year, probably including Apple's iPhone 6, as well as the iPad 5 and iPad mini 2.
Apple will ditch Gorilla Glass in favour of sapphire crystal for iPhone 6
Apple could be considering a shift from Corning's Gorilla Glass to sapphire crystal for its future phones, a crack and scratch-proof material that Apple already uses for its iSight camera. Sapphire crystal's strength is beaten only by diamonds aon the scale of transparent materials.
iPhone 6 to have new 'touch-on' display following iPhone 5 in-cell problems
Apple may have introduced a new 'in-cell' display with its iPhone 5 as recently as December, but new reports suggest that problems with the technology have led Apple to consider using anew 'touch-on' display in the next generation iPhone.
iPhone 6 could use TSMC to boost performance and reduce power consumption
News that Samsung's Galaxy S4 may support 802.11ac, also known as '5G WiFi', has led tospeculation that Apple's iPhone 6 could support the standard as well.
iPhone 6 could read your mind
In February, an Apple patent application was published, describing a system that would allow an iPhone to automatically switch modes by anticipating your needs. Read more here.
iPhone 6 could have wireless charging capabilities
Apple could be planning to introduce wireless charging to its iPhone 6, following in the footsteps of Nokia, LG and HTC.
Ex Apple CEO John Sculley has said that he thinks Ive will notice the 'next big thing' to boost Apple out of what he describes as a 'lull in innovation'.
There are few iPhone 6 leaked images, most leaked images seem to refer to earlier iPhone 5 models. These could be iPhone 6 prototype designs (Apple typically works several years, and iterations ahead) or they could be iPhone 5 designs that didn't make the grade.
'First claimed photos' of iPhone 6 rear casing
A parts company has posted photos of what it's calling the iPhone 5S, supposedly snapped on an assembly line. They suggest that the iPhone 6 or iPhone 5S will have roughly the same firm factor as the iPhone 5, but has some minor changes to the internal layout - so the components and screen could be due a modification or two.
Russian site AppleInsider.ru offers up a "hands-on" demo of the iPhone 6 via the video shown below:
Designer Arthur Reis created these 3D renderings in March, showing an ultra-thin design with 'touch anywhere' Home button and 'iSight Pro' camera.
Toronto-based 3D designer Peter Zigich has published concept images based on the rumours that Apple could be preparing to launch three new iPhones this year. The image shows an iPhone mini, iPhone 6 and iPhablet with home buttons on the side to allow more room for the display or reduce the overall size of the device.
The artist at CiccareseDesign has come up with the 3D concept design below, based on an alleged test prototype with a similar shape to the latest iPod nano.
