iPhone 5 will have a dual core (A5) processor, 1GB of RAM, a slightly larger screen edge-to-edge but approximately the same form factor. Camera will be upgraded to 8MP.

It will come with an aluminum back.

Available in 16, 32 and for the first time, 64GB sizes. White and Black.

• iTunes connectivity – it already hooks into the iTunes Music Store via wifi, why not allow it to browse and playback music from shared iTunes libraries on the LAN? I would love to be able to access my music or friends’ music when I’m visiting and don’t have a laptop around. Syncing tunes wirelessly and sharing tunes would also be fantastic additions.

It was probably the feature I most wanted back then, and the last one to arrive. This pleases me.

There was one other item on the list that never made it, and that’s having access to the radio channels in iTunes. That feature’s largely been supplanted by the availability of 3rd party radio apps. Just as well too, since Apple hasn’t really done much with their radio channels and I’m honestly surprised they’re still in there. Now hopefully Apple can keep itself from killing off third content providers entirely.

What do I want next? Here’s a short list:

• “Lossless” music downloads in the store. Even better would be HD audio, DVD-A or SACD quality music. Unlikely given how uninterested the recording industry (and, I guess consumers) seems to feel about it.
• Multiple encodings. Like video, it’d be neat if I could store a lossless version of a track and a lower-quality compressed version for carrying around on my ‘pods. iTunes can do it with video so audio should be easy.
• Alternate formats. WAV, FLAC, WMA, OGG. Unlikely at best.
• Separation of services from the core of iTunes. App, Music and Movie Stores, Ping (I predict Ping’ll disappear altogether in a year or so), Books (?), TV and Movies…

iTunes has gotten hugely complicated and is the cause of many slow-downs and beachballs during the course of the day. Most of the time, I just want a music player. I never actually watch movies or TV in iTunes preferring other players. I only use it to get video onto my iP*ds but I’d much prefer not having to clutter up my computer’s storage with the extra video copies. Hell, while I’m thinking wishfully, maybe it’d be nice if Apple would let me play AVI/XviD, WMVs and WebM video while we’re at it to save me the trouble of transcoding.

I won’t hold my breath. All signs point to Apple locking down iTunes even tighter (and bloating it even further). Talk of removing optical drives on all future Macs and forcing users to buy everything through the iTunes Store is not that far-off considering some of the recent money grabbing. Then again, maybe they’ll get broken up for anti-competitive practices. I give that a couple of years at their current rate.

Tilt to Live

Prod mentioned this to me this week on IM. A single line message that read “tilt to live”. I was all, “wtf is that? What are you talking about?” I believe he replied tersely, “iPod”. So I did the search, found the game, saw that it was on-sale and said, “why not?”.

And I’m super-glad that I did. This has become my latest “I’ve got 5 minutes to burn” game on my iPhone. After starting, the pace gradually picks up until you’re tilting for your life (as the title suggests), your little arrow-ship being pursued by an ever growing and evolving field of red dots. Gameplay is basic. You have a number of floating power-ups to help you defend yourself against the red swarm. Music is a jazzy little number reminiscent of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon that is pretty amusing, though if you’re like me, you’ll eventually just turn it off or listen to your own tunes. The motion sensing is excellent and fluid.

What really makes this game stand out is some of the online features from AGONline(?). Built-in awards and social networking features keep things interesting. The awards themselves are pretty funny.

highly recommended.

Orbital

My previous “5-minute” game is the surprisingly strategic Orbital. I learned of this game when I saw tech journalist Andy Ihnatko mention it in one of his iPad reviews. I looked it up and thought it seemed interesting.

And it is! Gameplay is simple, you fire a projectile that bounces around the field until it slows to a stop at which point, it balloons into a disc that expands until it touches a wall or another disc. Said discs need to be struck 3 times by your projectiles to be removed from the board and giving you a point. If your projectile comes back to a “death line” and touches it, you die and it’s game over.

There are three different game-types, but you’ll really only want to play Gravity mode where the discs cause your projectile to curve around them as if affected by a gravitational field. The grid background warps in a pleasing way to indicate where the gravitational pull becomes strongest.

It sounds simple, but there’s a real art to surviving for any length of time. As in all good games, it’s quick to learn but takes awhile to master. It’s challenging enough that you can keep going back and enjoying subsequent games.

Doodle Jump

The game that keeps on giving. You really gotta hand it to the developers of Doodle Jump: They keep adding value to this awesome accelerometer powered platformer. It’s incredibly simple. Your doodle-dude jumps on platforms. You tilt to move side-to-size to position him over the next platform. You try to get as high as you can. Various power ups like jetpacks, propeller beanies, springs and trampolines help propel you to new heights. There are monsters that you can shoot with your doodler’s nose.

It’s 99¢ and if you don’t have it, just go get it. Come back when you’ve made it past 30k points and we’ll talk.

Uniwar

This is another new title (to me) that may have been around for awhile. I’m a sucker for turn-based strategy games and this is basically a straight copy of the online game WeeWars. I never really got into WeeWars not knowing anybody else who was playing it for very long, so kind of forgot about it. There’s something to be said for having a game like this on a portable device as you can play it anywhere.

It comes with a stand-alone campaign and an online component. The kicker here is that they’ve done a great job of implementing both push and email notifications so iPod users can still get notified when it’s their turn.

I’ve only played a couple of games so far, and would like to see a couple of new armies added to flesh things out a bit. And maybe a map editor so you can roll your own games. Still, the implementation is so well done that these are minor quibbles.

Sword & Poker

This is a weird one. I logged quite a few hours playing this through to level 28 or so. The premise is pretty simple. You have a 5×5 grid with the inner 3×3 populated with playing cards. You have a set of 4 cards with which to make a hand of 5 in any of the rows, colums or two diagonals. These poker hands do “damage” to your opponent who you’re fighting in a kind of pokemon-esque battle to the finish. You have shield and a weapon which determines how much damage your hands do. And there’s magic. And you’re in a dungeon fighting monsters.

If it sounds weird, that’s because it is. But it’s surprisingly fun and really well put together. Very addictive and the various weapons and shields you can buy keep you progressing against the steadily tougher enemies you meet in the later levels.

I’ve got a bunch more games installed, including some of the biggies by NGMoco and others. But these are the games that I keep coming back to and playing. What are your favorites?

Watched some of the live stream from Engadget on the iPad announcement today. It was, as expected, a tablet shaped like a big iPod. It comes with wireless and it can hook up to a 3G network if you buy the big one. Notably, for me, were the things it didn’t do:

• No camera (!)
• Poor battery life
• Limited storage
• Multitasking?
• iPhone OS

It’s kind of neat, but honestly, I can’t see myself using this thing very much. It seems tailor made for air travel, when you want to watch a movie on a decent screen or maybe type up some notes. Pretty-much exactly what Andy Ihnatko wrote for the Sun-Times. I travel a fair bit, but certainly not enough to warrant adding yet another gadget to my collection. It won’t replace my Kindle with its awesome battery life and relaxing screen.

As a gaming device, it may become compelling at some point, but as the iPhone has proven, accelerometers are great for one type of game: Doodle Jump. Virtual controllers through touch are not a great control mechanism.

The lack of any mention of multitasking is even more worrisome, making this not very good for communications. I can’t run an IRC client and a messenger client in the background while surfing the web (on Safari, of course, there will be no Firefox for this due to their restrictive rules). Sure, there may be push notification, but that means leaving whatever I’m doing and launching the app before I can respond, possibly losing context. No video camera means no video chat.

In short, it’s a big iPod. I’ll wait and see how it does over the next year, but won’t rush out to buy one.

As luck would have it, Instapaper Free makes a great reading source for your iPod or iPhone. I’ve been using the free instapaper web service for about half a year now and frequently find something online I’ll flag to read later with the keen bookmarklet. Then, when I have an Internet or phone connection, I can sync my articles in the app on my iPhone. Instapaper even reformats the articles for mobile consumption using something similar to Arc90′s Readability bookmarklet.

Of course, now I’ve finished all my saved articles and am left wonderig what to read next. I have a few books loaded into Stanza, but I’m right in the middle of another book and don’t feel like switching. So I’m blogging. From somewhere above Quebec. The iPhone WordPress app keeps getting better.

Update! While writing this post I was thinking, “gee, this’d be cool if I could get this content onto my Kindle”. Sure enough, there’s an experimental option on the Instapaper page to download any folder’s most-recent 20 items in .mobi or ePub formats. Nice!

Great tips and a couple of App recommendations from Phil Coffman on taking great pictures with your iPhone. At a minimum, you should get yourself Mill Color and Adobe Photoshop Mobile. (iTunes links)

Phil Coffman – Art Director + Photographer » iPhone Photography.

The fix was to turn off syncing of Contacts and Calendars in iTunes. Then turn off MobileMe syncing for Contacts and Calendars from the iPhone. Turn them back on and the you’ll be prompted to merge your contacts and calendars which you should do. When done, you’ll be syncing over the air, but not to your computer which should be syncing to whatever service you use anyway.

I was going to write a little thing about how fun the ngmoco game Topple was, maybe even with an accompanying screen shot, but the App Store is still ridiculously slow here.

Instead, I’m going to write just a little bit about monocultures and why they suck. When everything works, you can almost believe that owning an iPhone and using iTunes is the bees’ knees. “It just works” is a popular phrase bandied-about among Apple fans. Apple just posted a huge $1.6bn profit for their last quarter. Apple is on more desktops and in more go-bags than ever before.

But it doesn’t always work. Systems are bound to fail sometimes, and when a central one like the App Store is inaccessible, it can feel like your device is broken. Sometimes, that little badge on the App Store icon can remind you that you’ve got outdated apps that you can’t get to. There are a couple of apps I wanted to try out and even pay money for (mobile Colloquy for one, Rolando is another) but I can’t get at them. “Try again later” is the antithesis of the impulse purchase and that is largely what the whole iTunes Music/App Store is based on.

Fortunately, the internet came to the rescue and can at least provide some iPhone app shopping happiness even when the mothership is leaving orbit. App Shopper, which I believe I’ve mentioned before is a great web-based app-search system. It even lets you sort by price and view price changes. Right now, I conducted a little experiment, clicking on an App in the (finally loaded) App Store and then typing in and searching for the same name on App Shopper. App Shopper won hands down but clicking “Buy” still takes you to the iTunes store.

is listening to ‘Future In Computer Hell’ by Junkie XL from the album, ‘Saturday Teenage Kick’

PS, get well, Steve.