iPhone 5 Specs & Features Described Again By Person That Had Access to It

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Remember the iPhone 5? Of course you do! It’s that super iOS 5 smartphone that should have been announced alongside the iPhone 4S this year, at least according to some rumors. But that never happened and all we got was this iPhone 4-lookalike that ended up selling over 4 million units in its launch weekend.

Today, on a cold day of November, the iPhone 5 comes back from the dead to haunt us. Business Insider reports that the iPhone 5 was indeed real, according to a “source who played with a prototype.”

And while these may seem very familiar to you, since we toyed with such specs and features long before Tim Cook & Friends introduced the iPhone 4S, we’ll have to list them again, as they were detailed by this secret source:

• 4-inch touchscreen display with “messed up color profile” that would apparently suggest the iPhone 5 would have a better display (apparently Apple “tends to “ugly up” features it is actually improving in some of its prototypes to disguise them”
• aluminum back like the iPad 2 with colored models also in the pipeline with help of Liquid Metal technology
• physical Home button replaced by touch-based button – “you could touch it and hold it and physically reboot the device”
• “squished,” “flatter” design
• “much faster” performance than normal iPhones as it had “its limiter removed to disguise its actual power”
• “its battery life sucked”
• 10-megapixel camera
• Siri-support, initially named “Assistant”

The publication seems to have the answer as to why Apple decided not to launch the device this year:

He [the source] says the rumor among Apple employees is that Steve Jobs was unhappy with the bigger screen because it “fragmented” iPhones, Apple’s big argument against Android is the way all the different phones from different manufacturers fragment that operating system.

After reading Steve Jobs biography you’d see why such an argument makes plenty of sense coming from a micro-managing control-freak genius like Steve Jobs who always wanted to make great products. If the argument above is valid, and considering Jobs’ famous burst against 7-inch tablets, then we can already forget about a mini iPad model too. The obvious counter-argument is the iPod. Just compare the various iPod nano designs for example, and you’ll realize Apple was not so keen on preserving the first design lines of that particular iPod family. And the same goes for other iPod models too.

When it comes to smartphones, the discussion will take a different path, one that changes everything again (pun intended).  A bigger iPhone display automatically means some apps may look strange on a bigger display if not updated for it. But if you ask me launching a bigger iPhone would not necessarily mean fragmenting the brand as the device would still run iOS 5, and fragmentation is all about the OS when it comes to mobile platforms, not different designs. I’m sure developers would me more than happy to adapt their apps to run on the bigger device, since ultimately they’d make plenty of money off them, and they’d probably offer support in their apps for as many differently-sized display the company would use when it comes to iOS devices.

At the end of the day, we’re still looking at another iPhone 5 rumor that can’t be confirmed at this time. Will it be released next year? We’ll speculate more on the matter in the coming months, although by then the device should be called the iPhone 6, since the fifth-generation iPhone already exists and it’s sold in stores around the world as the iPhone 4S.