What should the next iPhone have?

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

What will the next version of the iPhone have that the current one doesn’t?

Will it have a keyboard for those who haven’t been touched — in a good way — by the iPhone’s touchscreen? How about GPS capabilities? Will there be iPhones in different sizes, similar to what Apple has done with its iPod digital music player?

With a recent shortage of the phones in U.S. stores, and indications that a new model may be released within the next few months, it’s natural to pose the questions.

Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said 3G, a faster broadband connection, is coming to the new iPhone "in 60 days." He made the remark last week while speaking at a Beet.TV executive summit in Washington, D.C. A video clip of the statement was shared on technology blog Engadget.com.

What does Apple say? Very little. The company routinely declines to comment on products that are in development.

“They’re clearly one of the more secretive organizations around,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president of Gartner Research.

“They’re very, very tight with information on what they’re doing,” said Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting, which recently surveyed 460 iPhone owners about their likes and dislikes of the phone.

From touch to tactile?
In that survey, 43 percent “strongly supported making at least one major physical change to the iPhone: making it larger or smaller, adding a keyboard or adding a keypad,” Rubicon said in its report.

“There are a lot of people who would like to have a 12-key keypad, because it’s easier for them to dial,” said Mace.

“You get that tactile feedback of actually touching the buttons, instead of just having the slippery screen.”

The Rubicon survey also found that the iPhone is used “less often for composing e-mail than reading it, since the device lacks a physical keyboard.”

Apple announced last month that its free iPhone 2.0 software upgrade, due in late June, will include Microsoft’s Exchange Active Sync software. The program synchronizes with a PC for e-mail, calendar and contact information. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

By doing so, Apple is aiming to grab a share of the business smartphone market now dominated by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

Rubicon said in its report that “if Apple really wants to target RIM…it will need to create an iPhone with a thumb keyboard, something that (Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has spoken against in the past.”

Dan Tynan, a PC World contributing editor, wrote a recent open letter to Jobs about the “top things to fix” in the next iPhone. Among them: the need for a keyboard.

“Yeah, the touchscreen is cool. And maybe the kids are down with doing the two-finger tango,” he wrote. “But we thumb typists are tapping our fingers in frustration.”

He suggested a “slide-out keyboard option,” and said, “even an add-on Bluetooth keyboard might work.”

GPS and a little light
Dulaney, of Gartner, thinks adding a GPS chip to the iPhone would be a “logical” enhancement to the phone’s location-mapping software. It lets users approximate their locations, using phone cell towers and local Wi-Fi networks.

“GPS would offer additional accuracy,” he said. “There’s enough evidence that this is a technology that Apple likes, and can make revenue from.”

Various GPS subscriptions are available for certain BlackBerry models. One, by TeleNav, costs $10 a month; another, by Garmin, is $100 a year.

“That’s cheaper than paying $500 for a GPS system, and with a subscription plan, users don’t have to shell out this big amount of money,” Dulaney said.

He also thinks it’s possible Apple might change the iPhone’s LCD screen to a more energy-efficient OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screen.

The difference, he said, is that although OLED is about twice as expensive as using LCD, it’s also more energy-efficient, takes less physical space in the device and would allow “for other technologies like GPS or 3G, without having an impact on battery life.”

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