The new screens measure at least 4 inches diagonally, the people said, compared with 3.5 inches on Apple’s latest model, the iPhone 4S. Production is set to begin next month, the people said. Analysts have predicted that the next iPhone will come out in the fall.

Bloomberg adds some fuel to the fire with their sources who say that “Steve Jobs had worked closely on the redesigned phone before his death in October.” Which gives me some more hope that if the next iPhone does have a 4-inch display it will be for some very good reasons.

There’s also been a lot of talk about how Apple will change the design of the iPhone to incorporate the larger display. And, Rene Ritchie has done a good job running down the possibilities.

I’m of the opinion that if Apple were to change the iPhone’s display, making it taller and keeping it 640 pixels wide is probably the best bet. It will make older apps look better on the new display (by adding black bars to the top and bottom) and will make it easier for developers to port their apps to the new display size, since apps are already more flexible with vertical height to account for the larger status bar during phone calls.

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The idea isn’t to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It’s to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, “Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort.”

Unskippable garbage before the movie is one of the many reasons why I’ve ripped every DVD I own. I have a feeling that making movies easier to watch will discourage pirates far more than forcing them to sit through annoying government warnings.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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And, I’m not the only one who plans on holding onto the older version.

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This week, Microsoft revealed that the new operating system won’t have any kind of DVD playback, unless you specifically purchase Media Center or use third-party DVD software.

Apple pulls optical disc drives out of their computers and Microsoft pulls DVD playback out of their OS. It’s not surprising that they’re a few years behind.

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Like most one-hit wonders, fans got bored and moved on.

(Via Ben Brooks.)

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What we’ve learned: the new iPhone will indeed be longer and thinner than the iPhone 4 and 4S. […] According to our source, Apple will make one major change to the rear casing, adding a metal panel to the central back of the new iPhone.

iLounge has also been told that there will be a redesigned dock connector that will be smaller than the current one but slightly larger than the current iPhone’s bottom speaker.

I love the idea of a smaller dock connector (although, I don’t know if they’re necessary anymore) but I don’t want a 4-inch iPhone. One of my favorite things about the iPhone is it’s compact size and elongating the device and putting a larger display on it doesn’t sound like an improvement. I don’t want Apple to move in the direction that Android handset manufacturers have.

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While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links.

I’m this close to switching to Bing. Google’s search results page has been driving me nuts for a while but that stupid “+You” button that they shoved in the upper left might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The only one thing I’d change with Bing’s search results page is to move the ads a little bit further to the right. But, I think it’s safe to say that the only thing keeping me on Google is old habits.

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I was very excited to try out Sunstroke when I first heard that it was coming to the iPhone just a few days before it’s release. When it finally came I was not disappointed.

Sunstroke is an RSS client developed by Gone East that syncs with your installation of Shawn Inman’s Fever. The client works just as advertised. It gives full access to your feeds, saved items, and hot links which are the most popular links among the RSS feeds that you subscribe to.

Navigating through the application is easy and intuitive, tapping on a feed group will list all of the items in that group with options along the bottom to show read items and to toggle between sorting by feed or by date. Tapping on the arrow along the right will list all of the feeds in the chosen group if you’d like to read items from a specific feed.

From the individual item view you can tap on the title to open the item in Sunstroke’s integrated browser or you can save it using the button on the bottom left. If you’d like to jump to the next or previous item in your current list you can use a pull-t0-refresh like action to move between them, which I’ve found incredibly handy for those feeds where I want to read everything published. Along the bottom right in the individual item view there is a sharing button that can be used to open the item in Safari, tweet the link, email the link, or send the it to Instapaper. And, there are even more options for sharing in the application’s settings alongside the ability to show unread counts and tweak some of the application’s behavior.

The Hot Links feature works just like you’d want it to, giving you the option to change the date range along the bottom of the screen. The links are listed with the corresponding link temperature along the right so that you have an idea of how popular a given link is among the feeds that you subscribe to. Tapping on the link will bring you to the web page unless you’re subscribed to that sites RSS feed, in which case it will display the individual item without having to load the web page at all. And, tapping on the arrows along the right will list all of the RSS feeds that have linked to that page.

I don’t find myself using the Hot links very often, only if I haven’t read my feeds in a few days and want a way to catch up quickly. I’ve always been more of a “subscribe only to feeds that matter so that I can scan every headline” kind of guy. But, I still find it useful on occasion.

The design of the application is just wonderful, using a cool (or should I say hot?) white, grey, and red color scheme that makes the applications stand out among most of the feed readers I’ve seen for iOS. The application even pops on the iPhone home screen because of it’s bright red icon.

The application feels really stable to me only hiccuping a few times during the month that I’ve been using it. The few errors that I’ve gotten were that the Fever installation was unreachable but it’s unclear whether that was the application’s fault or a blip with my web server. What I do know is that I haven’t seen the error in several days and I’ve never had the application crash on me.

If you, like me, have fallen in love with Fever but want something that’s a little bit faster for viewing your feeds on your iPhone, I suggest giving Sunstroke a try. The application is $4.99 which may seem high compared to other RSS clients on the iPhone. But, most of those clients aren’t worth your time. And, Sunstroke is competitively priced with other (what I would consider to be) premium RSS clients like NetNewsWire and Reeder. But those clients only sync with Google Reader, and I enjoy using Fever much more than I ever enjoyed using Google Reader.

Sunstroke – $4.99

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

I don’t have any interest in letting Google index my files. And call me old fashioned, but if I’m going to be doing any collaborating, I’d rather do it in person.

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We did encounter a snag using it however, our tablet would randomly reboot every few minutes while the dongle was attached, though a sticker on the kit’s front implores users to update their slate before use. Our tablet is up to date, of course, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see a compatibility fix in the coming weeks. Despite matching our Prime’s color profile, the dongle is a little on the ugly side, facing its screws towards the user, rather than hiding them on the tablet’s back. Hiccups and eyesores aside, the attachment works, plain and simple. It isn’t as elegant of a solution as we might as hoped, but at least it’s free.

It causes random reboots, its ugly, and it’s a dongle. But hey, at least it’s free. I guess I just don’t understand why people put up with sub-par hardware.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

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