iPhone 4G to be the iPhone HD?

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When it rains, it pours and we have had a veritable torrential downpour of Apple related news and rumors, no doubt incited by the impending April 3rd iPad launch. The latest rumor to hit the mill originated from John Gruber who dropped some juicy details on the rumored iPhone 4G on his Daring Fireball blog. The new iPhone, according to Gruber, may include a member of the A4-family CPU/system on a chip, a high resolution 960×640 display, a front facing camera, and a new version of the iPhone OS that supports multitasking by third party applications.

Gruber has a good track record of dropping Apple-related information on his blog  and the features listed above are reasonable enough to be believable. The A4 system on a chip (SOC) is the proprietary Apple chipset that is used in the iPad and one that could potentially make its way into the new iPhone, hopefully at the same 1GHz clock speed. The idea of a high resolution display is also sensible given the current trend of increasingly high resolution displays appearing on mobile phones like the Motorola DROID and the HTC HD2.

A front facing camera has been rumored previously with multiple supporting lines of evidence. We have seen a recent Apple patent application that clearly shows a portable handheld device with a front facing camera and O2 UK leaked new tariff information that added charges for video calling. The most convincing evidence, though, is the presence of new icons embedded in a version of the iPhone OS 3.2 Software Development Kit that reference commands such as “Accept Video” or “Decline or End Video”. Where else would you use such icons and commands but in a video conferencing application that is driven by a front facing camera?

Last but not least, the idea of third party multitasking has been rumored over and over again by multiple sources in a stream of rumors that stretch all the way back to iPhone OS 3.0 which launched in June 2009. This feature is probably the most controversial with Steve Jobs, in the past, downplaying the idea of multitasking on the iPhone OS platform and a vocal assemblage of iPhone owners desperately requesting this feature.

Wondering about the name that Apple may give to this next generation iPhone? Engadget added a tidbit of information that suggested it may be called the iPhone HD. Though it does buck the trend of labeling the device with a 3G, it is catchy isn’t it?