Rumour Review: Grading the Papers

by Eric March on June 10, 2008 at 1:33 am

Now that it’s all over and done with, we can sit back with leisure and reflect upon the last few months since talk about the 3G iPhone began. There have been two and a half metric butloads of rumours over the last few months, many of them obviously specious, some passable, and others being pretty sound. So which rumours get the checkmark and which get the giant red F? Let’s take a trip through the Wayback Machine and hand out some marks.

PASS

• More Evidence that iPhone with 3G Support is Coming June 2008
  Bit hard to deny that now.
• True GPS Support Found in Device Emulator Included with SDK Beta 4
• Yep. There be GPS.
• Rogers Wireless: iPhone Coming to Canada Q3 2008
  Technically, this is true, having a release date 11 days into Q308 — but I suspect this might have been by accident, as the popular consensus was end of June, and I suspect the July release date is the result of a slight delay in production. But that’s a rumour unto itself, and my own at that.
• Rumor: .Mac Relaunch to Coincide with iPhone 2.0
  Indeed; .Mac is now known as MobileMe, though it’s been retooled as an Exchange Server for the Mac set.
• Rumour: Next iPhone to Cost Only $199
  This one was quite astute, actually.
• 2nd Gen iPhone: Trusted Source Gets a Chance to Test it Out; Spills the Beans
  Remarkably, this one from way back at the end of April was spot on from every angle, even if some salient points were conspicuously absent.
• Walt Mossberg Spills the Beans: iPhone 3G in T-Minus ~60 Days
  Funny thing is, even though he recused himself from this April 7th statement the next day, ol’ Mossie turned out to be almost exactly right.
• Handwriting Recognition May Come to the iPhone, However Don’t Get Excited..
  This is kind of iffy. It was predicated on the wording of the job description hinting that the job may extend beyond OS X — meaning, perhaps, the iPhone. Technically though the new iPhone does have handwriting recognition — for Chinese (trad.) input. Could this have been an outgrowth of that?
• Microsoft Possibly Working on More Apps for iPhone/Touch
  Kinda-sorta; Apple did complete the Office document trifecta by including support for Powerpoint in the iPhone 2.0, so … maybe?
• iPhone 2.0 + Geotagging = GPS?
  We already covered the GPS rumour, so this gets the nod for geotagging.
  
• Apple Announces: The Steve to Showcase Mac OS X iPhone Development Platform at WWDC08 Keynote
  But this was pretty much a given anyway.
• iPhone OS 2.0 Includes GPS-Like Live Location Tracking
  Although it’s not “GPS-like” but full-on GPS, this gets the pass because there really is live location tracking.
• iPhone 2.0 to Have Wireless .Mac Syncing?.. YouTube Plugin?.. New Decoder Support?
  Two outta three ain’t bad, especially for an end-of-march rumour. No new decoder support that I’m aware of. .Mac (MobileMe) and the in-browser YouTube thing are a go though.

FAIL

• iPhone-Sized Boxes Rumored to be Showing Up at Apple Product Resellers
  No, Virginia, there is no iPhone 3G shuffling off to stores. Yet.
• Alleged iPhone 3G Hands-On From a Vodafone Employee
  4 models? Black skin glued on to the back? 20% thinner? Three strikes. You FAIL. (You could make an argument for the fact that the edges are thinner, but then you’d just be a douche.)
• iPhone 2.0 Rumours: Thinner, Capacious, GPSified and Subsidized
  It’s thicker, and there’s no 32GB version. (Yes, this one gets mixed marks for being right on the other three points — two of which we already pretty much knew at that point.)
• The various janky “leaked” images
  Epic. Fail.
• More 3G iPhone Rumors: Color Choices, Prices, Swisscom to be the First
  Technically, there are colour choices: White and black. No silver though, sorry. Prices were also way off the mark here. And again, no 32GB model.
• 3G iPhone to have 3G Internet, GPS, Video Conferencing, and… TV?
  Half right — and the obvious half at that. Video conferencing (a branch of the also-ran “front-facing camera” rumour that also failed) is a no, as is mobile TV. Unless you count the forthcoming release of SlingPlayer Mobile.
• Rumour: Australian iPhones to be Sold Unlocked
  Nope. They’re gonna be locked up and tethered to a contract plan globally.
• Rumor: 3G iPhone to Better Support 3D Graphics Thanks to Imagination Tech.
  As cool as this would have been, I’m not surprised Apple would stick with the PowerVR MBX. It wouldn’t have made sense to trade up to the SGX when they’re just bringing devs on board to write games. Maybe next year.
• Haptic Feedback Implementation Coming to iPhone
  Sorry, no haptics.
• Kevin Rose (Founder of Digg.com) Shares His iPhone Rumors, Again
  Oh, Kevin. You’re always good for a laugh. But please do keep right on truckin’ Kev. If you stab at enough things in the dark, eventually you’re bound to hit something. Love Digg, by the way.
• Is the iPhone Coming to Canada This September?
  No. But the good news is that it’s coming in July.
• iPhone Contact Search & Meeting Invite Revealed - Enterprise Users Only
  Remember that whole multiple-versions-of-iPhone thing that suggested there would be tiered devices for enterprise, pro, and basic users? Yeah. FAIL.
• 10M 3G iPhones and OLED Coming?
  I can’t say much about the quantity of phones that will be ready by July 11th, but the OLED is a definite fail.
• The NY Times Writes About the Upcoming iPhone 2.0
  Multi-level failure here.

Now, there are still a few straggling outstanding rumours, mostly dealing with cases, since we haven’t had any real confirmation from case vendors as to whether nor not the rumours about them receiving dimensional specs early was true or not. Those we’ll have to wait ’til July to prove or disprove. I also passed over a number of other rumours which were generally rehashings or tweaks of the existing rumours listed above, so there was no point in listing them all. I may have also missed one or two — feel free to link to ones I’ve missed in the comments.

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