With the New iPad 3 out of the bag, the Apple rumor mill is now looking towards the iPhone 5 and its impending release sometime in 2012.
Steve Jobs biography hints iPhone 5 design language
At this point, nothing is known about the iPhone 5 and if anything is even close to concrete, it would be that the iPhone 5 will be LTE capable. Now, the best-selling Steve Jobs biography may in fact reveal more details about the iPhone 5 that were once thought lost.
According to Paulo Santos of SeekingAlpha, the international versions of the Steve Jobs biography contained an extra paragraph which were left out of the US edition. Santos translated that paragraph from Portuguese which spoke of product testing by none other than Apple’s Sir Jonathan Ive:
“Weeks became friends with Jony Ive, who sometimes came to visit him at his lake house north of New York. “I can show Jony some similar glass samples, and he can tell them apart just by touching them,” said Weeks. “Only my head of research can do the same. And when you show something to Steve, he either likes it – or doesn’t like it – instantly. But Jony, he plays with it, examines it, studies the tinniest detail and capabilities.” In 2010, Ive took his most senior managers to a Corning factory, to make glass together with the specialist glass makers there. The company that year was working on a tremendously stronger glass, codenamed “Godzilla Glass,” and it hoped someday to be able to make glass and ceramic tough enough to be used for an iPhone that would not need to have a metal rim. “Jobs and Apple made us better,” Weeks said. “Each of us are fanatical about the products we make.”
Now the interesting part from this excerpt would be the talk of an all-glass iPhone which wouldn’t require that problematic metal rim found to have caused signal reception issues. Of course, if Apple were to eliminate the metal rim from the iPhone 5, the edges would have to be rounded so as to not become dangerous.
Whether the Godzilla Glass helped Apple accomplish this is unclear but if it did, then we may be seeing an all-glass iPhone 5 later this year.
