Apple to Announce iPhone 5 on Sept. 12 

Apple‘s long-awaited new iPhone will be announced on Sept. 12, according to a report.

The blog iMore reports that Apple will announce the new iPhone — possibly called the iPhone 5 — plus a new iPod Nano via a special announcement on that data. The products will then hit retail on Sept. 21.

There is also a possibility that Apple will announce the iPad Mini on the same day.

Apple reps could not be reached for comment. During a call with analysts last week, though, the company repeatedly referred to a mysterious “fall event.”

The iMore report comes after The Guardian also reported last week that the new iPhone would be released in “mid-September.” The Guardian also reported that “the device will introduce a new 19-pin power and control connector on its base, dumping the 30-pin connector first introduced with the third-generation iPod in April 2003.”

Apple’s last iPhone release was the iPhone 4S on Oct. 4

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5 Essential Apps for Olympic Fanatics

1. Buddy TV Guide

Buddy TV Guide allows you to navigate channels quickly and easily, so you won't miss your favorite Olympian's event. After you select channels, you'll be able to find them and watch at a moment's notice.

Price: FREE

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2. PlayUp

Keep up with the Olympics in real-time and socialize with other fans via PlayUp. This app also customizes your feed based on your location; for example, if you're located in the U.S., that country's team results would come up first.

Price: FREE

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3. Reuters Olympics London 2012

Reuters iPad and iPhone apps are great for sports photography fans. The app updates all the latest pictures from some of the Olympics' best moments.

Price: FREE

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4. NBC Olympics

NBC has taken its exclusive coverage further by introducing mobile applications. Follow your favorite teams or individuals and your country's medal count as the games progress.

Price: FREE

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5. OPlanner

OPlanner makes it easy to keep up with everything Olympic. Loaded with the complete schedule of events, the app lets you search by sporting event, date, local time and even gender.

Plus, tag events you don’t want to miss, set up reminders and share events you’re particularly interested in with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Price: $0.99

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Keeping up with Olympic events and your favorite athletes has never been easier. Even in the past four years since the Beijing summer games, technology has expanded tremendously. We can follow live events from virtually anywhere.

While we can’t catch each and every live event, we can tune into our favorites with the help of several recently launched apps. NBC released mobile apps for smartphones and tablets in the U.S. this week. The Buddy TV Guide allows you to easily search and find what you’d like to watch. Unfortunately, the availability of some applications depends on a user’s location; for example, the BBC application is not available in the U.S.

Cheer for your team on the go with the help of our favorite apps for this Olympic season.

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Should You Wait for the iPhone 5?

For most companies, selling 26 million of any product would be reason to jump for joy. For Apple, however, when it posted iPhone sales of just 26 million in the previous quarter, it was a disappointment.

Analysts had predicted Apple would sell about 29 million iPhones, a drop from the 35.1 million sold the last quarter, but a manageable one. But 26 million is more like a free-fall — especially when you consider Apple’s iPhone sales increased over the same period in 2011, even though that year’s new model, the iPhone 4S, was still months away from being announced.

As CEO Tim Cook himself observed on Apple’s earnings call, speculation about the next iPhone — the so-called “iPhone 5″— may have played a part. After all, if you’re thinking about buying an iPhone, and you’re convinced Apple will debut its latest and greatest smartphone in a few short months, why wouldn’t you wait?

It’s not quite that simple, though. The same thoughts surely occurred to buyers last year, but there was no drop in sales until the summer, even though rumors were arguably even more rampant. There are two greater forces at work here: 1) The technologies that are rumored to be coming to the next iPhone are generational leaps in mobile tech, not mere incremental upgrades. And 2) Android is offering those very technologies, giving competing phones a greater edge.

So if you’re in the market for a smartphone today, is it a good idea to still wait patiently for the iPhone 5 (which, based on past history, is due to launch in the early fall) or should you start eyeing the competition? And why not get an iPhone 4S anyway? It’s still relatively new. Here’s what you should be thinking about:

Leaps in Mobile Tech

Apple, of course, hasn’t said one word about what the next iPhone will be, or even if there’ll be one. However, per usual, there are dozens if not hundreds of rumors and alleged leaks about what features the iPhone 5 will have. A couple of the most talked-about abilities the iPhone 5 might have are 4G LTE and NFC (near-field communication).

Anyone who’s used an LTE phone can tell you it’s a huge leap in connection speed over 3G technologies, which are what current iPhones all have (misleading indicators on the AT&T version be damned). There’s simply no way the iPhone 5 doesn’t have LTE. The connections give a speed boost to all data tasks — from watching HD videos to downloading email attachments.

However, this doesn’t come free. In addition to buying the new phone, you may want to get a new data plan, since LTE phones, by their nature, eat up data much more quickly. Also keep in mind that the carriers are pushing for users to switch away from unlimited plans. The carriers haven’t said anything about what sort of plans will be available for the iPhone 5 either, but it seems doubtful any unlimited plans will be in the cards, even “grandfathered” ones.

Then there’s NFC, the extremely short-range wireless tech that enables mobile payments. This feature is becoming so commonplace on phones that it’s hard to see Apple ignoring it yet again. In addition, many see Apple’s introduction of Passbook in iOS 6 as its first step into the mobile-payments space. Apple needs to have NFC in the next iPhone if it hopes to have any real influence there.

Besides the addition of LTE and NFC, there looks to be a strong chance Apple will pump up the size of the iPhone’s screen to at least 4 inches and shrink the dock connector to a mini-size proprietary plug. Both upgrades have obvious advantages, although a smaller jack would present an issue for anyone who uses a lot of legacy iPhone accessories. While Apple would be crazy not to release an adapter, it might not be included with the phone and it’s not necessarily something you’d carry around with you in any case.

At the same time, a smaller dock connector would help Apple improve on one of the features it holds up high: its thin design.

Android’s Edge

So waiting for the iPhone 5 seems like a good idea, mainly for the high-speed LTE connection and larger screen, but NFC and a potentially slimmer phone are nice, too (again, all rumor). However, if you wanted all those features and aren’t yet an iPhone user, you can get them all today from any number of handsets on the Android platform.

Besides all those hardware features, Android phones have better native camera apps than the iPhone’s. Newer Android phones like the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III are equipped with burst modes and the ability to snap pictures while shooting video. On top of that, with the latest OS software, Jelly Bean, Android phones can now match Siri in terms of voice abilities.

It’s with the software, however, where Android falls down. Fragmentation is a huge problem for the platform, meaning once you commit to a device, it’s a big question mark as to when the latest version of the Android OS — or even the one before that — will be available to you.

As for the other platform options, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, both Microsoft and RIM are planning major upgrades — with new hardware — in the next several months. As a first-time purchase, neither are really worth considering until then.

Waiting: Smarter Than Usual

While it’s generally a bad idea to wait for a mythical product with phantom features, the iPhone 5 is a special case. We can reasonably predict what some of the major upgrades will be over the iPhone 4S, and they are indeed major (LTE being the biggie).

The iPhone 4S is still a fine phone — it’s thin, it has a well-performing processor in the dual-core Apple A5 chipand of course there’s Siri. But speaking as someone who reviews competing phones regularly, it’s starting to look, well, old. In addition to obvious advantage of LTE, competing handsets are thinner, faster, lighter and have bigger screens.

The iPhone 5 looks sure to have most, if not all of those things, too, but it won’t get here for a few months. Should you wait? If you were thinking about an iPhone 4S, I’d say yes — at least for most people. But if you’re not yet married to Apple, the latest Android phones already have pretty much everything that will make the next iPhone special (probably).

Apple can blame rumors and speculation all it wants, but the bottom line is that the current iPhone is now a generation behind, technologically, the state-of-the-art phones of today. LTE, NFC and big screens aren’t incremental upgrades — they’re the features that will define smartphones for the next few years. For anyone dead-set on buying an Apple phone that will stay current for more than a few months, though, the smart choice is to wait.

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Here’s How Good Nokia’s 41-Megapixel Camera Phone Is 

Nokia 808 PureView

The Nokia 808 PureView comes in several colors. It's heavier than your average phone, with the camera lens protruding from the back. By far its most interesting feature is the 41-megapixel camera, which takes amazing photos.

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Park Avenue in New York City

This is a view up Park Avenue in New York on a summer day. You can see the Chrysler Building in the background.

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Close Up: Traffic

From the same picture, we zoomed in on the traffic. This is from the 12th floor of our building, and about three blocks away.

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Close Up: Chrysler Building

From the same picture, the Chrysler Building isn't totally clear, but we can get in pretty close.

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Building in Foreground

Workers put up a billboard for The Campaign across the street from Mashable.

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Close Up: Men at Work

We can easily zoom in on the action.

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Even Closer

Unfortunately, the zoom degrades into fuzziness at this point.

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Portrait Shot

Another shot down Park Avenue, but we opted for a portrait to show the length.

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Close Up: Human Traffic

A close up of pedestrians two blocks away. Again, we're 12 floors up.

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Downtown

A view down 23rd Street, headed east.

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Close Up: The East River

You can see the East River pretty clearly in this shot, taken from the previous one. It was only retouched slightly to bring up the sharpness.

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Skyline

New York's sea of buildings.

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Close Up: Who's on That Roof?

Zooming in from the previous shot, we can definitely see figures on the roof across the street.

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Traffic

Another shot of 23rd Street, now with more of the traffic visible.

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Close Up: Rooftop Patio

A lovely rooftop patio in the middle of the city.

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Close Up: Get Your Hot Dogs Here!

From the street scene, we can easily spy food vendors and pedestrians. You can also almost make out the construction writing on the street below.

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Close Up: Bird's-Eye View

Details on this building are also not too blurry, considering how far it is.

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The Nokia 808 Pureview blows other cellphone cameras out of the water — but its clunky interface makes it almost not worth the effort.

Earlier this year, Nokia said it would release the 808 PureView, a phone with a 41-megapixel camera. That’s a number not found on many other cameras on the market, and Nokia claimed it would allow users to take jawdropping photos of far-off scenes that could be easily zoomed and manipulated.

Mashable put the camera to the test to see if it lived up to the promise. You can see the gallery of images from our tests above. These images were taken on the roof of the building that houses the Mashable offices in Manhattan, about 12 stories up.

As you can see from the photos, the camera is beyond anything else you’ll find on a phone. The large file sizes really allow for close crops on details of photos. While adding more megapixels doesn’t equal a better quality image, it leads to bigger files that you can do more things with in post-production.

The 808 PureView also offers far more features than you’ll find on most phones, such as white balance and autofocus. All of this is accessible from the phone’s touch screen. While this can’t compare to something like a DSLR, for users wanting to pack a high-powered point-and-shoot on their phone, it’s perfect.

Unfortunately, the interface is the phone’s biggest downfall. It’s hard to figure out how to actually get the phone’s camera into 41-megapixel mode. It’s not a default setting at all, and you have to navigate through a series of obtuse menus to change your photos’ quality and size.

Given that the phone trumpets this feature, it should be visible on the camera’s main menu. The image sizes also had meaningless names, such as “PureView” and “Full Resolution,” to differentiate them.

Not making large images the default makes sense when trying to conserve space — a 41-megapixel image is roughly 34 megabytes — but it defeats the purpose of having such a powerful camera. While it’s a great fit for a phone, it lives in a clunky ecosystem that hides its potential.

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