iPhone News Updated

iPhone 5 hardware spec check

With Apple now on the record about an October 4 iPhone event, analysts are reaffirming their prognostications about the phone’s hardware–and adding an item or two to a growing list of specifications.

Chris Whitmore, Deutsche Bank Equity Research, said in a research note Monday that he expects an iPhone 5 with aluminum unibody construction, better camera, and a slightly larger screen size. No big surprise there.

Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, said on Tuesday he expects better graphics silicon–not unlike the big performance increase that Apple boasted about for the iPad 2.

Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster probably had the most intriguing speculation this this week, saying today he expects speech-based features for the iPhone.

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Battle of the tablets: Amazon v Apple

One after another, like moths to a flame, computer-makers have been seduced into entering the market for tablets. Apple made it look so irresistible, with 29 million eager and sometimes fanatical consumers snapping up an iPad in the device’s first 15 months.

But neither Samsung nor Motorola nor Acer could beg or borrow any of Apple’s magic. Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, said it shipped only 200,000 of its PlayBooks in three months — about what Apple sells in three days. Hewlett-Packard, which flopped with the TouchPad, was the latest to get burned.

Now comes a final competitor, the best-placed challenger of all: Amazon.com. The retailer is on the verge of introducing its own tablet, analysts predict, a souped-up colour version of its Kindle e-reader that will undercut the iPad in price and aim to steal away a couple of million in unit sales by Christmas.

A competition between Amazon and Apple tablets will be a battle that pits the company that created the first popular e-reader (and set off a still-unfolding revolution in how books are consumed) against the company that created the first popular tablet (and set off a revolution in progress about how entertainment and other media are consumed).

Both companies are riding high, racking up record revenues and seeing their stock market valuations cruise to new peaks. Each has ample resources to enjoy a pitched struggle for people’s attention and wallets.

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