iPhone 4 Repair Guide

It’s also the best clue yet that Apple isn’t about to upstage the iPad with a smartphone that’s more powerful, faster and less-expensive than its quick selling tablet.

Earlier this week, A Vietnamese forum published photographs of what it claimed was an iPhone. Several of the images were of the iPhone during and after a teardown, exposing internal components, including the logic board.

The exterior of the Vietnamese iPhone closely resembles the case of an earlier prototype photographed by technology blog Gizmodo, which paid $5,000 for the device. The Gizmodo-obtained iPhone prototype raised a ruckus when it was disclosed by the site last month, with Apple demanding its return and California police involved in an investigation into possible theft charges.

A 21-year-old California man was identified by his lawyer as the person who took the iPhone prototype from a Redwood City, Calif. bar after an Apple software engineer left it behind.

Unlike Gizmodo’s iPhone, the one that surfaced in Vietnam is labeled with production markings that identify it as a 16GB model.

When photographs of the Vietnamese iPhone are blown up, markings on the processor closely match those on production models of the iPad, the iFixit Web site noted Wednesday. According to iFixit, the markings mean that the next iPhone will be powered by the Apple-designed A4 SOC (system on a chip), which also runs the iPad.

“That makes sense,” said Aaron Vronko, CEO of Portage, Mich.-based Rapid Repair, a repair shop and do-it-yourself parts supplier for consumer devices, including Apple’s iPod and iPhone. Vronko regularly tears apart Apple hardware products — most recently the iPad — to get an idea of how they’re built and what capabilities they have.

“That completely gels with the direction Apple is heading,” Vronko added. “They’re loathe to make a device and have it less expensive and more powerful than the iPad. So it makes sense that the iPhone will use the same processor, as long as it’s not more powerful than the iPad.”

When Gizmodo published photos of the iPhone prototype it had acquired, Vronko speculated that Apple would also use the A4 in its next-generation smartphone.

iFixit claimed that the markings on the A4 showed that the fourth-generation iPhone will include 256MB of system memory, the same amount as the iPad and last year’s iPhone 3GS.

That, too, fits with Apple’s announced plans to debut a limited form of multi-tasking with the next iPhone, said Vronko. In March, Apple previewed iPhone OS 4 and announced that the mobile operating system upgrade would allow specific forms of multitasking via seven new APIs (application programming interfaces).

“Call it partial multitasking,” said Vronko of Apple’s approach. “It’s a handy way for them to handle it, since they then control what apps multitask. Most apps have little or no need for multitasking.”

The 256MB of system memory is enough to allow partial multitasking in the next iPhone, Vronko said. If the iPhone had more — say 512MB of memory — it might mean Apple has bigger multitasking plans than it has publicly admitted.

But contrary to reports, Vronko wasn’t buying the idea that the latest leaked iPhone was brought to Vietnam from the U.S. To him, it made sense that it popped up in Vietnam.

“Chinese companies have invested billions in Vietnam,” he noted, referring to electronics production and assembly plants. “This could have leaked from a draft production facility in Vietnam.”

Although he retained some skepticism of the iPhone’s legitimacy, he said it was probably a production unit, or one very near production quality. “If it’s real, that fits. Apple has to have three, four or five million iPhones in the pipeline at launch, so they’d have to have started building them this month,” Vronko said.

Apple is expected to unveil the next iPhone June 7, the opening day of its annual developers conference in San Francisco, and start selling the smartphone later that month.

But after this spring’s leaks — unprecedented for Apple — what’s left for Apple to talk about at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)?

“I imagine they held back a few key things on iPhone OS 4,” Vronko. “Maybe they’ll show how the video chat is supposed to work. That may be the big ‘wow’ moment.”

Both the Gizmodo and Vietnamese iPhones have a front-facing camera in addition to the usual camera on the back of the smartphone. Most analysts and pundits, Vronko included, have assumed that the front-facing camera will be used for video chats and calls.

“How will that be used?” Vronko asked, saying that question was one to keep in mind over the next month as Apple introduces, then starts selling, the next iPhone. “Once they sell a few million [new] iPhones, there will be a few million people who suddenly have a video telephony-ready phone. How will American consumers take to what will be the first realistic large-scale video telephone?”

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com.

During a quarterly earnings conference call with Wall Street and industry analysts Tuesday, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer cited “future product transitions” as a contributing factor to the anticipated decline from a 42% margin for the year’s first quarter to a 36% margin for the quarter ending June 30.

The conservative guidance isn’t unusual: Apple typically underestimates its margins for upcoming periods, and often explains that “future product transitions” are one reason why it won’t clear as much profit.

But one analyst read more into those tea leaves.

“They seem to be saying that there’s more to the next quarter than the introduction of a new iPhone,” said Ezra Gottheil, senior analyst with Technology Business Research, referring to the expected launch of Apple’s next iPhone this summer.

Gottheil thinks that Apple is ready to make a major move into video, and based his bet on a series of clues in the company’s upcoming hardware, as well as the $1 billion data center in North Carolina that’s now hiring personnel.

Gottheil’s prognostications have been spot-on at times, off the mark at others. A year ago, he bet that Apple would enter the netbook market with an “iPod Touch on steroids,” a good description of the eventual iPad. In December 2008, however, he predicted that Apple would launch a pair of netbook-style systems the following month, something Apple did not do.

“The front-facing camera in the next iPhone is something we’ve always wanted,” Gottheil said, referring to this week’s disclosure by tech blog Gizmodo that the 2010 iPhone will have two cameras, including a new one that faces the user. “But that also makes sense if Apple is going to push into video conferencing, video social network or video social gaming.”

Calling that market a “kind of white space,” Gottheil sees it as one of those opportunities that Apple has historically grabbed. “Apple is the kind of company that could make that a big deal,” he said.

The current iPad, which lacks a camera — one of the pieces that was on most wish lists before the tablet debuted — also seems to have space in its current design for a front-facing camera, Gottheil added. Others, including teardown expert Aaron Vronko of Rapid Repair, have also speculated that the next iPad will sport a camera. “It looks like it’s all ready for the camera, even including a hole in the glass for the lens,” said Vronko, who earlier this month tore apart the first-generation iPad. “Apple probably made a game-time decision not to include it.”

Also in play, said Gottheil, is the $1 billion data center that Apple began building in Maiden, N.C., last year. Apple currently has 15 positions listed on its jobs site for the data center.

“That’s a humongous data center,” Gottheil observed. While others have speculated that the center will power an iTunes music streaming service or store customers’ iTunes libraries for everywhere access, Gottheil as a different idea. “Apple needs to get into the online services business, but it can’t be plain vanilla,” he said. “That’s not what Apple likes to do.”

Instead, he believes Apple will craft a video platform that other developers can use to build video-enabled iPhone and iPad applications, then use the data center as the switchboard that, for a fee, routes the ensuing data traffic. “They’ll build the platform, make an application or two — maybe a game where people see each other as they play — and then provide some kind of switchboard service. That’s exactly the kind of thing that they like to do.”

In a follow-up research note that Gottheil sent to clients today, he also hammered on the idea. “By providing critical applications and a platform for third-party development, Apple could create a compelling and very sticky subscription service,” he wrote.

Not everyone buys Gottheil’s theory on video and the data center. Brian Marshall, an analyst who tracks Apple for BroadPoint AmTech, agreed that the next iPhone would have a camera, and believes a refresh of the iPad with a camera will appear in time for this year’s holiday season. But he has different plans for the data center.

“That’s for their cloud-based service,” Marshall said, “which will probably be hosting iTunes libraries in the cloud. That will let customers access their iTunes [music] from anywhere, and untether it from their computers.”

Nothing about parsing Apple is easy, said Gottheil, who acknowledged that his conjectures could come to naught. “They’re always manipulating us with their guidance,” he admitted, talking about Apple’s tendency to under-promise and over-deliver, and the often fruitless attempts by outsiders to penetrate the company’s veil of secrecy. “But this could be a place for Apple to play in online.”

He has a few thoughts on what the blogosphere has been creating, have a read after the jump.

MM: Hey Aaron, thanks for taking my call today, can you give me a bit of background info on you and Rapid Repair?

AV: Hey Fabrizio, I’m the service manager for Rapid Repair, our company was founded 6 years ago and we repair mobile devices, gadgets, ipods, iphones, zunes, video game consoles and handheld consoles. We get shipments from all over the world and repair close to 500 a week. We also contribute to our general knowledge-base by buying the latest gadgets, taking them apart, and putting out repair guides on our website.

MM: That’s great, thanks. So lets get down to business, what do you think Apple will do with the iPhone 4G?

AV: I think that the big changes to expect for the iPhone 4G (4G meaning 4th generation, not the network), in contrast to the iPhone 3GS, will be the exact opposite. The iPhone 3GS changes were focused on the hardware, the horsepower, the core of the device and the kind of performance it can offer. It was basically 95% the same phone as the 3G, just a faster version of it. With the iPhone 4G it will be more or less with the same hardware capabilities, but totally revising the design of it and heavily tweaking, revising and adding to the software functionality but not necessarily in the core applications, but in the most common periphery apps.

MM: Can you tell me more about what you think the direction will be with software?

AV: The thing that made the iPhone successful in the first place was that it did about four applications that everyone who wants a smartphone wants, and it did it better than anyone else ever had. Those four or five applications will be about the same, its just the next 80 or 90 they will improve functionality on.

MM: How do you think the iPhone 4G will be compared to the iPad in terms of platforms and hardware? Will there be any cross-platform integration?

AV: I think its interesting to see to what extent they want to integrate iBooks, they probably most likely want to avoid that. They’ve got another market they are trying to create with the iPad, trying to offer the same functionality on the iPhone, and with that small of a screen size is not that effective for reading books (even though I think they might bump the screen size on the iPhone 4G). I wouldn’t be surprised to see it more focused on reading periodicals, daily news, weekly news. Perhaps expanding on the content delivery that the iBooks content delivery will use. Which I think is a great move, that’s one big piece that the iPad is missing is just one killer app and that it’s not way better than any other device that has come before it.

MM: Well we don’t know that for sure just yet.

AV: Yeah, based on what was shown. It’s not a better e-Reader than Amazon’s Kindle, its not a better computer than the MacBook Air, so far there is not one thing that’s better than everything else.

MM: How about hardware?

AV: I do think the iPhone 4G will use the same processor that is in the iPad. The new Apple A4 as they call it, or it may be called the A3, when it comes down to the hardware it will be the same basic design. The CPU inside that application processor will be an ARM Cortex-A9, the graphics processor will be a PowerVR SGX, probably a 535 or 540. But what they will do, instead of running that CPU at the same clockspeed as the iPad, they will just underlock it to about 600Mhz on the iPhone 4G. The reason they would do that is to save significantly on power.

By comparison, the processor that is in the iPhone 3GS is also running at 600Mhz, the new processor set could easily be 25% more powerful even if they ran it at the same clock speed. In fact, they could even slow it down to 500Mhz and it would still be a more powerful processor set, and it would use maybe half the power as the iPhone 3GS processor and still get just as much done. And thats a result of using a newer and more powerful processor design. Largely due to using a smaller manufacturing process.

MM: Do you think Apple would open up the iPhone 4G for multitasking?

AV: No, I would say not. They didn’t indicate it in the iPad so I would think not. They won’t want to change it from the iPhone 3GS. They have a pretty good history in doing this with the iPods. In one cycle they change the design, the next cycle they beef up the hardware with kind of the same design, and then the next cycle they change the design again. The really good reason for that, which makes a lot of sense for phones, is every 2 or 3 years peoples contracts expire and they can get a new phone when that expires. So it makes sense for Apple to make a device with substantially different capabilities, but nothing more than that. If you make phones with substantially different capabilities every year, then you end up with too many classes of applications and too much confusion of compatibility.

MM: What do you think about these “touch-sensitive case” rumors?

AV: The touch sensing case rumors are interesting. A design concept I think Apple might be playing with, but not an enhancement that would be in the next iPhone, this sounds like something what would more suit the iPad. I believe they will however tweak multi-touch, so you can come up with new gestures, but nothing changed at the core. The case should be an aluminum uni-body.

MM: How about hardware specifics, what will be inside this iPhone 4G that we haven’t talked about?

AV: Memory will be at 512MB, the cost is right and I couldn’t see Apple staying at 256MB for the cost differences. I think storage capacity will be in the options of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. No removable battery, if the iPhone is thought of as having a 2 year life cycle. On a 2 year basis most people are reasonably happy with their battery life.

MM: When do you think Apple will release the iPhone 4G?

AV: I would expect it to be close to the typical annual release, unless there is something groundbreaking that no one would expect there’s no reason that it couldn’t be out. The iPad is going to be out in March with that processor already on display, so processor production shouldn’t really hold them up. But they will need more for iPhone’s, I would say early June to mid-July. Whoever the fabricator is for the iPad A4 chip, will be the fabricator for the iPhone A4 chip. OLED screens are already available in the size Apple would want to use, the only thing they may want to be waiting on is Samsungs newer generation of OLED screens which are 25% brighter. They are in the mobiel handset form factor where you might get a reasonable level of performance in direct sunlight.

MM: What will it cost?

AV: It’s going to be the same or less. Certainly not more, $99, $199 and $299 are the most likely targets. Going any lower to that doesn’t net them any additional sales and thats the price point for most mobile phones, and they could make a killing on it because they are not upgrading most of the hardware inside, its a year later and a year cheaper and for the same price.

MM: There are rumors of video conferencing, what are your thoughts on that?

AV: I don’t think Apple is convinced that the customer they design for (North Americans) demand this feature.  Our mobile networks, (especially the beleaguered AT&T) are nowhere near ready to handle the heavy network demand and usage of these technologies, meaning it would be a WiFi only app and Apple doesn’t want to make their headline feature one that “just works… sometimes.”

MM: Anything else you might want to touch on, perhaps gaming, whats it all really about?

AV: I think its more about design and form factor, not performance on this. They are using newer chips, but thats mainly to increase battery life. Thats the trade off, you can increase battery life and increase performance with some level of trade off. I think you could see some pretty awesome games and battery life. If they use an OLED screen with the A4 chip, clock it all the way down to 500 or 600MHz, you could double the battery life in pretty much all applications from what the iPhone 3GS was. Or they could make the battery smaller and take it off the size and weight of the device with still a 50% increase.

MM: Well Aaron, thank you for your time and our readers will definitely appreciate your thoughts on this.

In this case, that means Apple’s iPhone OS 4, the next version of the company’s mobile operating system, which was previewed yesterday to reporters, bloggers, analysts and industry watchers.

Apple’s a few weeks late — the last two years it’s touted the new iPhone OS in mid-March — but it’s not so late that it puts a mid-summer release at risk. The company’s vast network of developers still has plenty of time to start building apps that will take advantage of the new before Apple does its usual unveiling of a revamped iPhone.

So, what’s in iPhone OS 4? A lot of catch-up, say some, a whole lot of goodness, say most. That’s the quick analysis, anyway, of the next generation software that will add a bunch of features, including a few, like multitasking, that users have been yapping about for years, to the growing collection of Apple’s mobile devices.

iPhone OS 4, like its last two predecessors, has more than a single FAQ can cover; this will play out from now until June, the presumed ship date for the next iPhone, and long after. But we wanted answers to the off-the-bat questions right away.

When do I get iPhone OS 4? True to form, Apple was no more specific than “this summer” for the upgrade’s release, although developers got their hands on a beta and the SDK (software developers kit) yesterday.

But only iPhone and iPod Touch users get the new OS this summer. iPad owners have to wait.

Wait? Wait until when? iPhone OS 4 won’t reach the iPad until “fall,” said Jobs today. But he didn’t say why.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, wondered whether the delay was to give Apple time to set some hardware ducks in a row. “I’d like to be able to scan [photos] into the iPad,” he said, and noted that others have asked for direct printing from the iPad, rather than requiring users to e-mail files to or sync files with a PC or Mac.

In fact, Apple may already be vetting hardware vendors, said Aaron Vronko, CEO of Rapid Repair, an iPhone repair firm and experienced teardown expert. There’s a USB controller inside the iPad, says Vrnoko, who disassembled an iPad last Saturday. The evidence is Apple’s online store, where the company’s selling a kit that connects s camera’s USB port to the iPad’s sync and charging port.

Vronko’s bet? Apple will allow select hardware manufacturers to access the controller — again the Apple’s control of the iPhone/iPad ecosystem — for, say, printing.

f these experts are right, maybe Apple requires time to line up those vendors, who need to write drivers, and will add those drivers to iPhone OS 4 between its release for the iPhone and iPad.Or Apple’s just jerking the chain of every iPad owner. Hard to tell.

How much will I pay for the update? Apple didn’t say today, but in the past it gave away upgrades to iPhone owners and charged iPod Touch users $10.

However, there’s a good chance that the upgrade will be free to everyone. Last year, Apple received approval to change its accounting practices so that it could recognize iPhone revenue immediately, rather than spread the income over 24 months. That older accounting method was what Apple used to justify the upgrade charge to iPod Touch owners. With that now moot, Apple’s in a position, accounting-wise, to provide free upgrades.

What’s in iPhone OS 4? Not surprisingly, Apple said the upgrade is a big deal.

Yesterday, the company boasted that iPhone OS 4 includes over 100 new end-user features, although it described only a handful. It also claimed that the OS offers developers more than 1,500 new APIs that can be used to add limited multitasking, open e-mail attachments, access the iPhone’s calendar and more.

What’s the most important, or at least most impressive, new feature? As always, your mileage may vary, but multitasking would be our pick.

With iPhone OS 4, some apps will be able to offer multitasking for specific purposes. The Skype VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), for example, can use one of seven new APIs to craft a new version that receives calls while other apps are in use, and lets users put callers on hold while they check something out in another app. The Pandora and Rhapsody music-streaming services, on the other hand, will be able to play tunes in the background, just like the native iPod app does.

How will I switch between apps that multitask? Double-tapping the home button brings up an app-switching tray that shows the active programs. Think of it as a dock for multitasking apps that slides up from the bottom of the screen.

While analyst Gottheil drew comparisons to Windows’ task manager, Jobs disagreed. In a Q&A session after the preview presentation, the Apple CEO denied any similarities. “In multitasking, if you see a task manager…[Apple's designers] blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.”

So I can finally switch between apps without closing the first, pressing the home button, then launching the second? Yes, you can.

Apple, in fact, called its “fast app switching” the biggest news within the big news of multitasking. “This is probably the easiest for developers to adopt, and probably the most important,” said Forestall.

Software that uses Apple’s fast app switching API can be put into what Forestall called a “quiescent state” in the background. We’d call it what it is … suspended. The app is frozen in place — “It’s not using any CPU at all,” Forestall said — and then resumes when you return.

“Most people don’t need multitasking,” said Gottheil of Technology Business Research. “They just want a way to quickly switch between programs.”

Will my instant messaging app use multitasking? What about Tweetdeck? Not really.

Apple is still, pardon the phrasing, pushing push notifications, the feature that debuted with iPhone 3.0 last summer. Push, sort of a poor man’s background processing, has the iPhone pinging Apple’s servers to see if there are, for example, new messages waiting for your instant message client. The upside? Push consumes less battery power than true multitasking.

Apple did add what it called “local notification” to iPhone OS 4. By using a new API, app developers can push notices from within the device, from their own apps. Until now, all push has come from Apple’s servers, sent to the iPhone. Scott Forestall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software, showed how a television programming guide could ping you when “The Colbert Report” was about to begin.

But that won’t really help out the Tweetdecks of the world.

Why is Apple doing multitasking this way? Why not just do it full bore? Battery and performance, said Scott Forestall, Apple’s senior vice president of iPhone software.

“How are we adding multitasking while preserving battery life and performance?” Forestall asked, then naturally answered his own question.

Apple has long cited battery drain and processor strain as the reasons why it didn’t implement multitasking on the iPhone, a feature familiar not only to computer users, but to smartphone owners. Google’s Android operating system, offered multitasking from the get-go.

Concern about the battery was also the reason why Apple went with the “multitasking lite” push notification last year.

But I’ve heard only some people get multitasking in iPhone OS 4. What’s up with that? You heard right.

iPhone OS 4 brings Apple’s form of multitasking to the iPad, iPhone 3GS and the third-generation iPod Touch, which first went on sale in early September 2009.

Have an iPhone 3G or iPod Touch from the line that debuted in 2008? Sorry, Charlie. You can upgrade to iPhone OS 4, and according to Jobs, “run many things” with the older hardware, but not multitasking.

Apple said nothing about the original iPhone, the one that doesn’t do 3G, or the first-generation iPod Touch. Here, the expression, “No news is good news” probably doesn’t apply. Don’t expect to run the new OS on the oldest devices.

This isn’t the first time that first-in-line customers have been stiffed. Last year, for example, iPhone 3.0′s new MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) support wouldn’t work on the 2007 iPhone hardware.

I want more than multitasking. What else does iPhone OS 4 have?

• Folders, finally, to organize apps into some semblance of order. You can drag-and-drop apps to and from folders.
• Universal inbox that drops messages from Web mail, MobileMe accounts and multiple Exchange accounts (that last also a first) into one place.
• Support for BlueTooth keyboards. The iPad has this now; iPhone and iPod Touch get it this summer.
• iBook. Apple’s bringing its iPad online bookstore and e-reader app to the iPhone and iPod Touch, albeit scaled to fit the smaller screens. It offers Kindle-esque features, including bookmark and last-page-read synchronization between devices.

Is there a list somewhere of the 100+ new features? No, that would make it too easy, wouldn’t it?

As is Apple’s wont, it only touched on what it considers the highlights of the upgrade, but didn’t recite, or provide, a full catalog of changes. Apple hits those same notes on its Web site, and gave a bird’s-eye-view of some of the new APIs on the iPhone developer site.

And I’ll be seeing ads in my apps, is that right? Yes, indeed.

Jobs talked for quite some time yesterday about the new iAd mobile ad service that Apple’s kicking off with iPhone OS 4.

He took a swipe at now-fierce-rival Google when he got started. “On a desktop, search is where it’s at,” he said. “But on mobile devices, that hasn’t happened. Search is not happening on phones. People are using apps. And this is where the opportunity is to deliver advertising is.”

Apple’s plan: Ads run within apps — that’s where the eyeballs are, Jobs essentially said — and those ads can be interactive and include video. Apple will sell and host the ads, then drop them into cooperating apps. Developers, said Jobs, can add iAd capability to their software in “an afternoon,” and get the big end of the 60%-40% split with Apple of the advertising proceeds.

From the demonstrations that Jobs gave yesterday, many of the ads will resemble, if not apps exactly, then apps within an app.

Will you see ads? You bet you will. Yesterday, Jobs claimed that the iPhone-iPod touch-iPad universe could provide as many as 1 billion ad impressions — one impression is one person seeing an advertisement one time — each day. Say that again: 1 billion ads each day.

How come we didn’t hear about a new iPhone? Not the time, wouldn’t be prudent.

The last two years, Apple has trotted out a preview of the next version of the iPhone OS in March, but waited until June to announce new hardware, then three to five weeks later, put the brand spankin’ new handset in stores.

So Apple’s just following iPhone protocol.

The iPad is the best-built first-generation mobile device Apple has ever produced, the owner of an iPod and iPhone repair company said yesterday after disassembling the new tablet.

“I’m impressed,” said Aaron Vronko, the CEO of Michigan-based Rapid Repair. “It’s the first first-generation device that we’ve seen from Apple that has great construction.” Rapid Repair is a repair shop and do-it-yourself parts supplier for consumer devices, including Apple’s iPod and iPhone and Microsoft’s Zune. (See also “A Visual Tour of the Apple iPad.”)

Vronko posted a step-by-step teardown of the iPad, complete with photos, to the Rapid Repair site Saturday, just hours after Apple kicked off tablet sales.

“It’s still not going to survive a drop, but everything that can be buttoned down, is,” said Vronko, referring to the logic board, battery and other components inside the iPad’s milled-aluminum casing. “Everything is engineered to fit to the next piece, even the off-the-shelf parts. The batteries are even separated to allow for the [Wi-Fi] antenna to run down the middle.”

Vronko also gave Apple a thumbs up for the iPad’s internal design. “Apple had a really clear idea of where they wanted to be with the iPad, and they just hit it on all counts,” said Vronko. “It’s designed for a specific set of tasks, and for those tasks it’s a great device.”

Evidence of that was obvious throughout the inside of the iPad, Vronko said, pointing to the battery as an example. “It’s a great design. It’s really wide, but it’s no thicker than the battery in the iPhone 3GS,” he said. “That helps dissipate the heat, the number one reason for battery failure. The wider [form] gives it a lot of surface area for heat dissipation. And putting it at the back of the case, between the case and the main board, protects [the electronics].” (See also “Apple iPad Stress Tests.”)

Vronko also applauded Apple’s use — or reuse — of some of the components already proven in the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as the BlueTooth and Wi-Fi radio parts. “Apple reused a lot of the smaller elements of the iPhone 3GS in the iPad, or the next generation of those parts,” he said Such repurposing also helped Apple keep down the manufacturing cost of the iPad.

“We’re talking about the accessory parts here,” he cautioned, “not the things that define the device.”

Even so, Vronko dinged Apple on some aspects of the iPad. “Nothing here is pushing the envelope,” he said. “The LCD is nice, but it’s not cutting edge.”

Apple could have added several more hours to the iPad’s battery life if it had pushed for a more advanced display technology, such as OLED (organic light emitting diode), which earlier this year Vronko predicted Apple would use in its then-still-rumored tablet. Because the display consumes more power than any other iPad component, and its requirements thus define how long an iPad can run between charges, an OLED screen would have extended the tablet’s battery life to at least 18 hours, Vronko said.

Apple estimates that the iPad can run up to 10 hours before needing recharging, although some reviewers have said they got as many as 12 hours out of a charge.

And Vronko worried that what he found inside the iPad may mean this first version won’t stand up to the competition, or the test of time. “Apple didn’t go overboard on what they put inside,” he said. “Is this enough hardware for the next 20 months of app development? I don’t think it is.”

Consumers trained to expect their smartphones and cell phones to last two years — the length of most mobile service contracts and the time between upgrading phones — may be disappointed by the iPad’s inability to keep pace with rivals, or even developers.

“After a year, it starts to look shaky for this iPad,” Vronko argued. “Remember, there will be lots of other tablet-based hardware [to compete with the iPad] by then.”

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg’s RSS feed. His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com.

http://www.rapidrepair.com/guides/ipad/ipad-repair-guide.html

“The iPad’s typical use scenario is sans power cord, whereas the power cord travels with the laptop,” says Aaron Vronko, CEO of Raid Repair, which services broken iPods and iPhones and replaces worn-out batteries. “It’s the biggest device to be used off the power cord most of the time. That makes the battery a huge factor in the success of this device and how it’s received by its audience.”

Apple’s iPad $99 battery replacement service is a bit of a misnomer; Apple will replace the entire iPad, not the battery.

Already, the iPad battery has come under fire. The iPad’s 10-inch LCD display requires a battery that’s more than five times the capacity and size of the iPhone 3GS battery. The screen alone consumes roughly 2 watts per hour, Vronko says, and will drain the large battery in 12 hours by itself.

Apple, which claims the iPad has a 10-hour battery life, doesn’t want the iPad to face the kind of vitriolic complaints regarding battery life that the iPhone has endured since its debut.

Bad News: Your iPhone Battery Is Dying

Every time you go through a charge cycle on your iPhone, you’ll permanently lose anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute of battery capacity. Typically, you’ll get 250 to 500 charge cycles before a lithium ion battery has outlived its usefulness, Vronko says.

(A charge cycle covers the entire capacity of the battery. For instance, if you drained a third of the battery and recharged it, and then used two-thirds of the battery the next day and recharged it, this would still be considered a single charge cycle.)

Using your iPhone in extreme temperatures—below 40 degrees Fahrenheit or above 95 degrees—will degrade the battery capacity faster, he says. Also, you shouldn’t regularly run your iPhone battery completely down before recharging it. Doing these things will shave maybe a minute and half off the total battery capacity per charge cycle, Vronko says.

However, it’s a good practice to run the battery dead before fully recharging it once a month to keep the chip on the battery and the chip on the device that measure the current flowing back and forth in sync . This is one of Vronko’s six tips for cleaning and caring for your iPhone.

There are ways to improve battery life of a single charge cycle. Here are three tips for getting more juice:

1. Disable power-hungry features such as Wi-Fi, Notifications and Location Services.

2. Buy a battery pack, especially if you plan on taking your iPhone to places that don’t have a ready power outlet like, say, a golf course. (Check out my review of iPhone app Golfshot GPS.)

3. Get it tested by an Apple Genius, because anecdotal evidence suggests there are a lot of iPhone 3GS lemons with poorly performing batteries on the market.

Time to Replace Your Battery?

Eventually, though, you’ll need to replace your iPhone battery.

Vronko says the battery-replacement demand curve starts with a 10-month-old iPhone. “That’s when we get the first run of customers,” he says. These customers are often heavy iPhone users who may have lost up to 30 percent of the original battery life—and 70 percent of the remaining battery is not good enough for them.

Next, Vronko sees a pick-up in demand for battery replacement with 12-to-15-month-old iPhones. The peak age for battery replacements is 18 months.

Rapid Repair charges $20 for just the iPhone battery, although you’ll have to be brave enough to put in the new battery yourself. Or it’ll cost $50 for the battery and Rapid Repair to do it.

For do-it-yourself folks, swapping in a new battery on an iPhone 3G or 3GS isn’t terribly difficult. The units have tiny screws for removing the outer shell, and the battery has a pluggable module. This wasn’t the case with the original iPhone, which had a battery that was soldered to the unit.

Vronko hasn’t seen the iPad yet, although he figures battery replacement won’t be easy given the iPad’s unibody design. Another sign is the fact that Apple itself plans to replace whole iPads rather than batteries.

“My guess is that the iPad is going to be more difficult for end users to open up the case without damaging it, in order to replace the battery,” Vronko says.

Tom Kaneshige is a senior writer for CIO.com in Silicon Valley. Send him an email at tkaneshige@cio.com. Or follow him on Twitter @kaneshige. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline.

With all the hype over Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s iPad announcement now behind us, Apple-eyes have now turned their attention to what might be on the docket for the anticipated release of iPhone 4G. We’ve torn down and rebuilt thousands of iPhones over the last few years and talked with scores of customers about how they’re using it and what’s important—and not important—to them. Based on Apple’s past patterns of gadget refreshes plus the design and hardware unveiled in the iPad, here are our predictions for what we can expect from the iPhone 4G, which is likely to drop sometime early this summer.

Redesigned aluminum unibody styling

Starting with its iPods, Apple has settled into a fairly predictable pattern of releasing a physical redesign one year and hardware performance upgrade the next. The venerable iPhone 3G embodied the total design overhaul (while keeping hardware performance nearly unchanged.)  A year later, the 3Gs came as an identical twin, but with a surge in performance due to a faster CPU, graphics processor and upgrades to even the minor chips. Since third-party iPhone apps and users are just starting to really take advantage of the new power from the 3Gs, it’s unlikely Apple is ready splinter it’s market again by upgrading performance in the 4th generation iPhone (aka iPhone 4G.)   The 4G’s new cutting edge energy sipping chips will instead be used to make a slimmer and sleeker exterior design of the Mac unibody styling, similar to the iPad with a single piece of aluminum casing with single glass front panel.

Chip change

Apple will likely integrate its new A4 chip into the iPhone 4G, albeit a clocked-down version to meet performance demands without unnecessarily sapping battery power. The 1Ghz A4 for iPad will likely be underclocked to around 600Mhz—ample horsepower for a device that doesn’t support multitasking. Besides, from a marketing perspective, Apple must leave a market segment for the iPad to have a unique purpose. To launch an iPhone with nearly identical hardware capabilities would undermine the company’s own market leadership and complicate the app store with three tiers of iPhone/iTouch app performance.

OLED screen

As much as they might have liked to put an OLED on board the iPad, the technology and manufacturing was at least six months away in displays of 7 inches or more. For the iPhone 4G, however, an OLED screen makes perfect sense. OLED screens up to 5” have been popping up in most of the latest class of new gadgets since late 2009.  While the current class of OLEDs can be hard to view in direct sunlight, Samsung has announced the first production runs of its new Super AM-OLED screens that are 25% brighter and may finally be a solid option for daylight use. Samsung has been a major supplier for Apple’s mobile devices in recent years and may be keen to preserve that revenue stream and showcase their lead in OLED screen tech with Apple as the first OEM customer with its new screen.

Improved secondary/tertiary app performance

The iPhone’s 4 or 5 headline functions (docked apps) likely won’t change much on a 4G version, but we are likely to see some changes to the secondary apps (the ones that come with every phone, but aren’t docked.)

A revamped developer’s kit

Apple’s been wise about cultivating the app industry it’s created, so last year Apple was careful not to alienate older iPhone users when they unveiled apps with superior performance on a 3Gs.  This cautious step forward left many developers content to code for the lowest common denominator (iPhone 2G) for an easier. The iPhone 4G launch will likely bring with it a focus on tweaking the developer’s kit and store so that app developers are empowered and encouraged to leverage the 3Gs and 4G capabilities for more powerful, engaging, and useful apps.    This year Apple will be keen to retain its leadership position by putting the focus on apps that require a 3Gs or better for full function.

Not going to happen

No discussion of predicted iPhone 4G features would be complete without the one it likely will not have: a front-facing web cam. Yep, you read that right: despite lots of rumors that video chat is coming, it just doesn’t seem plausible—yet. The fact is that North American networks simply are nowhere near capable of handling the demand. AT&T (NYSE: T) already takes considerable heat for its lack of capacity to handle iPhone traffic. When it debuts, video chat will be a headline feature for the iPhone, but Apple won’t do that if, “it just works… sometimes.”

There is, however, much greater demand and capacity for video chat in the European and Asian markets to the extent that phones without it may be seen as old tech. This begs the question: could an international version of the iPhone be on the horizon?

Editor’s note: We’ll know more about the iPhone 4G – or whatever Apple decides to call their next-generation iPhone – in the coming months. Stay tuned!

About the Author

Aaron Vronko is the founder and service manager at Rapid Repair, the most well-known and reputable national online repair service for digital electronics, including the iPhone, iPod and more. The company dissects more than 500 devices every week at its repair shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For more information, visit www.rapidrepair.com.