Digitimes, a site which likes to predict the future of Apple hardware by keeping track of the components Apple orders from its suppliers, has a juicy tidbit regarding the iPhone camera. Not only has Apple, apparently, ordered 40-45 million camera units from OmniVision Technologies for 2010 (up from around 21 million for this year), but those camera-chips are packed with five million pixels apiece.
That Apple would be upgrading the camera in the inevitable summer iPhone announcement is not a surprise, but it’s good to see the camera being taken seriously after the neglect of the first two iPhones. Hopefully these five megapixels will be good pixels, and not the terribly noisy pixels like those found crammed shoulder to shoulder in my Samsung 5MP phonecam, squashed onto the sensor like Tokyo subway commuters at rush-hour.
This rumor points to one other interesting iPhone fact, too. Now that the handset has everything it needs, from 3G to GPS to a compass, what can Apple do to improve it? The iPhone is really about software now, so we don’t expect the hardware to change much at all, other than faster chips and a few visual flourishes to make last year’s model look like, well, last year’s model.
Here's the article from Digitimes: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20091223PD225.html
That Apple would be upgrading the camera in the inevitable summer iPhone announcement is not a surprise, but it’s good to see the camera being taken seriously after the neglect of the first two iPhones. Hopefully these five megapixels will be good pixels, and not the terribly noisy pixels like those found crammed shoulder to shoulder in my Samsung 5MP phonecam, squashed onto the sensor like Tokyo subway commuters at rush-hour.
This rumor points to one other interesting iPhone fact, too. Now that the handset has everything it needs, from 3G to GPS to a compass, what can Apple do to improve it? The iPhone is really about software now, so we don’t expect the hardware to change much at all, other than faster chips and a few visual flourishes to make last year’s model look like, well, last year’s model.
Here's the article from Digitimes: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20091223PD225.html
