The Wall Street Journal made waves yesterday. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported Apple is ordering larger touchscreens for the next iPhone. Now, citing its own unnamed sources, Reuters somewhat confirmed the reported. Prepare yourself, iPhone diehards. All signs point to a larger iPhone.

The thought of a larger iPhone clearly scares people. Read the comments on my post yesterday, “It’s Time For A Larger iPhone.” They say 3.5-inches is the best size. You don’t have to move your thumb to navigate the whole screen, they say. A phone with a 3.5-inch screen fits in my hipster jeans!

But really, the main underlying thread seems to be some people are afraid that, just perhaps, Apple will adopt something from Android like the trend of a larger screen. Scary, I know.

Change is hard. Apple has used the same form factor for 4 iPhone generations spanning 5 years. The iPhone 4, and the 4S for that matter, is still one of the best looking phones on the market, with an impossibly thin design and stunning good looks. But it’s time for a change. Besides, logic and other credible rumors point to an internal change that might be forcing Apple’s hand in using a larger screen.

Along with a larger screen, the next iPhone is said to have 4G data connectivity. This requires a new mobile chipset, which, as proven by the new iPad presents a new set of challenges. Instead of growing the iPad’s height and width (and therefore the screen size), the new iPad was made a bit thicker to accommodate the larger battery needed to power the 4G chipset and retina display. Apple doesn’t have that luxury with the iPhone. The next iPhone cannot be thicker than the current iPhone. But it can be taller.

4G chipsets are generally not as mature as their 3G counterparts. They require more power and thus require a larger battery. Instead of making the iPhone thicker, logic suggests that Apple would then make the phone a bit taller, making room for a larger, likely retina, display.

This change will likely upset the Apple diehards. As the screen size increased on Android phones, iPhone users took to Internet comments and forums to defend the smallish iPhone’s 3.5-inch screen. It seems sooner versus later now, Apple will use a different screen for the iPhone. Change is hard.

[image via Mark Wilkie/Flickr]

It's nearly time for WWDC 2012, Apple's sold-out World Wide Developers Conference, and that means the Apple rumour factory is in full flow.

There's a difference between a wish list and rock-solid predictions, however, and the internet has more of the former than the latter. So what can we really expect from this year's WWDC?

OS X Mountain Lion at WWDC

We know about this already: Gatekeeper security, iCloud integration, the new notification and game centres, AirPlay mirroring... OS X Mountain Lion is looking pretty tasty, and it'll be in near-final form at WWDC.

A launch date announcement is almost certain and a public beta a distinct possibility, but our favourite rumour is that Mountain Lion will be a free upgrade. That's not as far fetched as it sounds: Apple is giving free copies of Snow Leopard to MobileMe users who haven't switched to iCloud, and of course iOS upgrades are already free.

WWDC unveiling of iOS 6

This one's a given: Apple's on a yearly release schedule for iOS, and the whole thing will be signed off and ready for the expected iPhone 5 launch in October. There are all kinds of tantalising possibilities: more Siri, both in terms of device support and software integration; NFC; some kind of dual-app multitasking for iPads so you can look at two things at once; Apple's long-rumoured mapping API; and perhaps an improved notifications area with support for more widgets and the ability to access commonly-used features such as Airplane Mode. Can we make our annual request for multiple user accounts on the iPad, please? Thanks.

FutTv : VYELSF0RY9oP3

WWDC hardware announcements

WWDC is primarily a software event, but that doesn't mean we won't see new kit: Apple has unveiled important products there in the past such as the iPhone 4 and the 2009 MacBook Pro. There are four key hardware rumours this year: the new iPhone, Retina MacBook Pros, Apple TV and the iPad Mini.

The new iPhone, aka the iPhone 5, at WWDC

It's coming, we know, but the D in WWDC stands for Developers, not "Dude, it's the new iPhone!" Unless the incoming iPhone 5 is significantly different from a developer's perspective — that is, if it has a completely different aspect ratio or other significant hardware change, or if it runs Android — then we don't think the new iPhone's going to make an appearance. Others, however, beg to differ.

WWDC unveiling of Retina MacBook Pros

They're coming, we know, but the big question is when: while OS X already contains a HiDPI mode for retina-style displays, they're still very challenging bits of hardware to make. The MacBook Pro is certainly due a refresh, but a retina refresh might be pushing it for 2012.

A new Apple TV at WWDC

We're not feeling this one. Apple TV is still officially a hobby, and while it runs a variant of iOS Apple hasn't opened it up to developers yet. That may well change at WWDC, but we a significant Apple TV announcement is a long shot.

The iPad Mini at WWDC

It exists, and it's rumoured for a 2012 release, so why not unveil it at WWDC? Assuming that a 7.85-inch iPad Mini has been given the green light, a June unveiling would generate enormous excitement, annoying Amazon, Android manufacturers and Windows 8 OEMs simultaneously without overshadowing the Autumn launch of the iPhone 5. If Apple's going to embrace the entire tablet market as it did the digital music market with its various iPods, then the iPad Mini is inevitable.

The last time TechCrunch heard from the internet-for-everyone proponents at FreedomPop, they revealed to us that they were working on an iPhone 4/4S case with a built-in WiMax radio that would give their users monthly access to free mobile broadband.

Now, according to my high-level source, the company is very close to bringing these things into the real world. Ahead of their beta launch slated for the summer, the company has just quietly begun to take pre-orders for the nifty iPhone accessory, though some of their plans for the product have changed over the past few months.

For one, they’re not running with the deposit model my source previously alluded to. Instead, they’re just going to sell the case itself for $99, and users can contact the company to return the unit and get their refund at any time. It’s functionally the same experience for the user, except without the accounting headaches that come with managing scores of deposits.

Perhaps the most notable tweak is that they’ve changed how much free bandwidth each user gets right out of the gate. The original plan was to offer 1GB of WiMax data access for free to users each month, but they’ve since dropped that “guaranteed monthly minimum” to 500MB. Sort of a bummer, I agree, but I’m told that they’re trying to err on the side of caution for now.

Glass-half-full types can take solace in the fact that the company will not neuter their free plan to below 500MB per month, and that the initial level of bandwidth allocation could actually grow over time.

If you’re concerned that 500MB/month isn’t that great, I’m also told users will be able to earn more bandwidth thanks to a social layer that FreedomPop is developing as part of the service. FreedomPop users will be able to connect with each other, and doing so nets them both of them an additional (sadly unspecified) amount of usage — especially popular (or smart) users can raise their monthly data allotment as high as 1GB.

Beyond that, users will also have the ability to share their location with their so-called FreedomFriends, but perhaps more importantly, users will be able to treat the amount of bandwidth they have at their disposal as a transferable commodity. If a friend of yours is bumping up against that 500MB limit and really doesn’t want to pay that $.01/MB overage fee, you’ll be able to transfer him or her a portion of your own monthly bandwidth allotment.

That, in short, is awesome. Larger wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T sell access to their data networks in pre-configured chunks, which often leaves their subscribers paying for more data than they actually need in a given month. The real frustration comes from the fact that the users who have paid for X amount of data access per month can’t do anything with it — the counter just resets at the end of the month at that’s that. Giving users more control over what they pay for (or don’t pay for, as the case may be) is a smart approach to working with a dumb pipe, and could help give FreedomPop users a reason to stick around.

A brief video demo of the case in action (seen above) was also passed along, and it offers up our first real look at what the darn thing looks like. Given that the case was a WiMax radio and a separate battery jammed into it, it’s understandably thick, but it doesn’t look much more offensive than some of the other hefty iPhone cases floating around out there. It doesn’t look like it would do a great job actually protecting the iPhone nestled inside it, but hey — you can’t always get what you want.

There are apps for productivity, apps for learning and well, apps for most things. With the exception of Ocarina by Smule, there are few virtual musical instruments for mobile devices that involve more physical interaction than just tapping a screen.

UK indie creative studio, Club 15CC, has just released the first in a series of new apps for the iPhone 4+ and iPad 2+ (we found that it also works on the latest iPod touch). Sound Wand makes use of the built-in motion sensors in these devices to create very unique and sophisticated virtual musical instruments.

The name of the app points to the action you need to play your mobile device as an instrument. Tap the screen and wave the device around like a wand and the music will start to play. The coloured bars act a bit like strings, as you move, they pass under your fingers where you touch the screen and are ‘plucked’ to create the music.

It’s nice to try an app that helps you move a round a little as opposed to just staring at the screen. There are various styles of music and you can change the pitch and tone with a few simple alterations in settings. The little information in settings is just enough for some light learning too, so this app would be suitable for kids, or those who are easily amused.

It is unlikely that you’ll create your opus on this app and there does not seem to be a way to record or export the tunes you can create. But as a distraction and an intriguing way to interact with a mobile phone or iPod, Sound Wand is not a bad way to pass the time. Just take care to wear headphones if you are planning a long jamming session.

Check out the video to see more about how it works.

➤ Sound Wand

The angry mobs in Beijing weren’t lying. Apple’s iPhone 4 has made a splash in China, bringing the company’s phone sales there up by fivefold from a year ago. The device didn’t debut there until this last quarter, months after it had been released in the U.S.

The company’s sales in the Asia Pacific region excluding Japan more than doubled year-over-year, rising 114 percent to $10.1 billion in the second quarter. Cook has already said in previous calls that China is the company’s second biggest market in terms of revenue behind the U.S. Now the market’s rising importance means that Asia-Pacific revenue has surpassed European revenue for the first time.

Demand was so insatiable for the iPhone 4 that the company had to shut down sales in retail stores amid the threat of rioting at the Sanlitun shopping center on the east side of Beijing. But Apple still faces some headwinds there. It’s not on the country’s largest carrier China Mobile and the company is embroiled in a trademark dispute over the name ‘iPad’ with Proview.

Cook said in the October earnings call: “For China — the sky’s the limit there. I’ve never seen so many people rise into the middle class who aspire to buy Apple products. It’s quickly become #2 on our list of top revenue countries.”

Here are some charts illustrating Apple’s revenue breakdown by geography from this quarter compared to the same time a year ago. I excluded retail revenues:

With only a few weeks left to go until Samsung’s big London reveal, the leaks are just flying out of the woodwork now. If that recent Brazilian leak didn’t quite fill you with much confidence, this one just may — the team at Tinhte.vn recently posted an extensive hands-on with what claims to be the Samsung i9300, perhaps better known as the Galaxy S III.

I know, I know, we’ve seen scores of leaks up to this point, but it’s worth pointing out that Tinhte has an impressive track record. They went hands-on with the new iPad before just about anyone else, not to mention scoring early images of the iPhone 4 and Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Tab over the years.

Anyway. The i9300 — which BGR claims is the correct model number next big Galaxy phone — features a 4.6-inch 720p AMOLED display on the front, and an 8-megapixel camera pod around back. If the body looks a little strange (not to mention different from that other recent leak), The Verge reports that the device in question is wrapped in a dummy shell so as to keep the device’s true visage from showing through.

Inside that ersatz shell is a 1.4GHz quad-core chipset, and thanks to a quick look at the device’s System Information screen, it indeed appears to one of Samsung’s Exynos 4×12 series systems-on-a-chip. The device also sports 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, support for NFC, and the usual microSD card slot. The specs that Team Tinhte spell out are a bit more realistic rumor mill has circulated recently, and lends a bit of credence to the notion that the GSIII is more of an incremental update than a full-blown revolution.

At this point, there’s no way to be sure that this device is indeed the Galaxy S III (or whatever Samsung ends up calling it), but the fact that Tinhte has since yanked their post entirely fills me with a glimmer of hope. Fortunately, a copy of the video has made its way to YouTube with English subtitles, which I’ve included below.

Starting last week, AT&T began unlocking iPhone's for users who wanted to take their phone to another service or travel overseas, but jailbreak users couldn't take advantage of the free service because AT&T's method required an update to the firmware. However, it is possible to unlock the official way through AT&T and still retain your jailbreak. More »

Consumer Reports, clearly moving on from whoring pageviews over heatgate, just planted the new iPad at the top of its recommended tablet chart. Citing the great screen, 5MP camera, and fast, dependable 4G Verizon data connectivity, the iPad is the best of the bunch, says Consumer Reports. But what about the new iPad’s excessive heat? Clearly people still need to, as a Consumer Reports’ spokesman said, “exercise caution”, right? Nope.

Much like Antennagate, the issue regarding the new iPad’s heat is merely a footnote in Consumer Reports’ final word. The new iPad still earned the top spot in its respective category. The iPhone 4 went on to sell millions of units, even with Consumer Reports’ negative slant, so Apple probably wasn’t sweating through heatgate.

Heatgate, or perhaps warmgate, fizzled out rather quickly when the temperature was put into perspective with competing tablets. Other outlets also quickly debunked Consumer Reports’ strange results regarding the battery. Like most products, the new iPad has quirks, but they’re greatly outweighed by the high-points.

Still, Consumer Reports finally got it right. The new iPad is the most impressive, and by that, the best tablet to buy on the market right now. It does get a tad warmer than its predecessor — something MG noted in our initial review — but it’s an amazing and immersive slate device.

Attention George Foreman: report to an Apple Store near you immediately. There’s a hot (literally) product, you simply must buy the entire inventory of to keep your grilling empire alive: the new iPad.

Or at least, that’s what the latest nonsense from Consumer Reports would have you believe.

We’ve seen this ridiculousness from Consumer Reports before. In June 2010, at the height of “Antennagate”, Consumer Reports figured out the art of click-bait. If you say something outlandish, even if it directly contradicts something you previously said (and sometimes that’s even better!), you must harp on a story to keep those precious pageviews flowing in. And so harp they did.

The reality of the Antennagate situation was always this: it was real, but it really wasn’t a big deal. The fact that the iPhone 4 went on to sell tens of millions of units — record numbers for Apple at the time — bringing in billions of dollars for the company with very few returns, sure seems to suggest Consumer Reports blew the situation way out of proportion. And what they’re doing today is arguably worse.

To be clear, it is true that the new iPad gives off more heat than the previous models. We were among the first to report this in our initial review of the device last week. Guess who didn’t note it in their initial report? Consumer Reports. A week ago, everything was peachy keen: The new iPad is shaping up as the best tablet yet.

But that review apparently didn’t generate the pageviews they would have liked. So today, we have the outlet firing back: Our test finds new iPad hits 116 degrees while running games.

While there’s nothing factually wrong with that title (presumably, I don’t have my iPad thermometer handy), it is misleading for average consumers — you know, Consumer Reports core audience. 116 degrees sounds hot. Really hot. Death Valley hot. It sounds like the thing is a grill.

The reality is that 116 degrees isn’t that hot for a computer. In fact, it’s only about 10 degrees or so hotter than the not-complained-about iPad 2 ran. And this is at the extreme, when graphic-intensive games that max out the new A5X chip are running. Even at this temperature, Consumer Reports notes:

During our tests, I held the new iPad in my hands. When it was at its hottest, it felt very warm but not especially uncomfortable if held for a brief period.

That’s pretty much what we noted last week:

One other slight downside which I have to assume is related to either the battery or the LTE functionality is that unlike previous iPad models, the new iPad does get noticeably warm in the lower left corner after prolonged use. It’s never hot, just warm. But again, I never noticed this on other models.

Warm. Not hot. But that didn’t stop Consumer Reports from giving their “scoop” to CNBC this morning and “upgrading” the new iPad from “not especially uncomfortable” to “uncomfortable”.

And that continued. As Consumer Reports spokesman James McQueen told the Associated Free Press today:

People need to exercise caution. We are not saying it is a dangerous product, but 116 degrees can be a little uncomfortable.

That, in turn, led the mainstream media and analysts to do what they do best: use jackassery in an attempt to pray on the masses and reap the rewards. One example:

Consumer Reports confirms iPad heat problems, could cause burns :usat.ly/GBGvmC

— Rob Enderle (@Enderle) March 20, 2012

“Could cause burns” — what the hell? I’ve been using the new iPad for nearly two weeks now. A lot. Not only has it not come close to rising above “warm”, I don’t even notice the heat anymore. Certainly, it’s still runs much cooler than almost every single laptop on the market today. And that’s something you have to put on your lap. Body exposure is maximized.

But a story about laptops being hot is boring. Everyone already knows that. No one would read it. The iPad is the sexy new thing. And it runs a little warm sometimes!!! AHHHHHHH!!!

Now we have “Warmgate” — complaints so ridiculous, they read like satire. But it doesn’t matter, Consumer Reports has done their job. Not their actual job, mind you, which is protecting consumers. They’ve done their new job: generating pageviews by any means necessary.

We will absolutely have a follow-up story from them tomorrow. And probably another one the next day. Then one contradicting what was previous said (which they’ve already done, of course).

We need a Consumer Reports to protect us from Consumer Reports.

EXCLUSIVE: Consumer Reports cannot recommend Hansel — too hot right now.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) March 20, 2012

Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom’s new FreedomPop project was initially shrouded in secrecy, but they’ve recently become a bit more talkative about how the company plans to offer “free wireless broadband” to their customers.

FreedomPop VP of Marketing Tony Miller spilled the beans about the company’s WiMax-based freemium wireless data service to Forbes, but left yet another question unanswered — what’s the “innovative” new wireless device they’ve got in the works?

Well, according to a high-level source inside FreedomPop, it’s an iPhone 4/4S case… with an integrated WiMax radio. Think of it as a mobile hotspot squeezed into a case — I’m told that it’ll run for up to 30 hours, and can share its Internet connection with up to eight devices (including the iPhone that it’s attached).

As I understand it, each FreedomPop iPhone case user will have free access to a 1GB data plan right off the bat. That’s the only plan that FreedomPop will offer for the sleeve, though their overage fees seem strangely familiar: each MB over the limit will cost a penny, which means every gigabyte over the limit is $10. That’s not to say that FreedomPop users can ditch their carriers entirely — the case alone isn’t enough to let users place voice calls, and major carriers generally won’t let you buy a smartphone without a data plan to go with it.

There are still some costs involved though, specifically a deposit that each user has to shell out for a WiMax-friendly iPhone case of their own. My source tells me that the deposit will be under $100, and will be fully refundable to customers if they ever choose to discontinue their service so long as the sleeve is still in good condition.

Users will also be running on ClearWire’s 4G network, and while that isn’t as fast as AT&T or Verizon LTE, it’s often more than enough to give 3G networks a run for their money (depending on their location, anyway). Their reliance on ClearWire could prove to be a bit of a stumbling block since it doesn’t have the biggest footprint, but FreedomPop is currently in talks with other “major” wireless providers about the possibility of branching out.

FreedomPop isn’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts — they’re obviously in it for some cold, hard cash. Their plan is to make money off of a slew of value-added services they intend to roll out in coming months — it’s their hope that they’ll be able to convert 10-15% of their free users into paying customers, which will subsidize the service for everyone else. Whether or not that actually pans out is another question entirely, but we’ll have to wait and see how much momentum FreedomPop will be able to build first.

As far as how innovative this thing is, well, that’s debatable. It’s a concept that we’ve seen pop up a few times in the past, perhaps most notably when Sprint started offering the ZTE Peel, an add-on for the iPod Touch that gave the device a persistent wireless Internet connection. But hey, free Internet thanks to some low-cost, low-risk hardware? Giddy up.