iPhone 5 gets ‘media stream’ social networking and new suppliers

January 24, 2011 By Jeffrey Van Camp

The iPhone 5 is on the horizon. We learn about new component suppliers for the device and some new features including media streaming and GPS location updates.

You know it’s a new year when you start hearing about the next version of the iPhone. Though it likely won’t debut until June, some early info on the iPhone 5 is already trickling out. A Chinese report claims that Apple has added several new suppliers to the iPhone 5 in an effort to save money, and 9to5 Mac has posted a number of new claims about the next iPhone including a new social networking feature called “media stream.”

New components from new places

A report from DigiTimes says that Apple has added several new component suppliers to its iPhone 5. Foxconn Electronics, Foxlink, Gold Circuit Electronics, and Epistar are all now on the Apple supply chain. Foxconn (Taiwan) will be supplying the earphones for the device, replacing Foster, a Japanese company. Foxlink will produce the earphone jack sockets for those earphones. GCE has been added as an additional HDI board manufacturer and Epistar is an LED chipmaker. InfoSync believes that Apple could be adding Toshiba and Sharp as screen manufacturers for the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 as well. Though little of this likely means anything to you, these new partnerships could explain the huge $3.9 billion Apple just spent on supply chain partnerships.

iPhone 5 going social

This one comes from 9to5 Mac. The site claims that the iPhone 5 may have a new feature called “Media Stream” that will make Ping seem like a bad dream. The site found a folder called “Media Stream” in the beta version of iOS 4.3. Within it is information on a feature called “Photo Streaming.” 9to5 Mac speculate that Apple is planning to let users set up photo streams of pictures so that friends who subscribe can instantly view the pictures from anywhere, a feature that would likely involve backing up pictures to the cloud and, in theory, be quite similar to pictures one uploads onto Facebook or Flickr. The service appears to be connected to MobileMe, but may go beyond pictures in the future to include audio and video in iOS 5.

Another feature called “Find My Friends” may work much like Google Latitude, and show you where your friends are at any given time via assisted GPS updates. We can only hope it will be implemented better than Latitude, which is more creepy than it is useful. 9to5 Mac speculates that all of these changes will coalesce into a new social networking service from Apple. We’re a bit doubtful about this. Apple does many things well, but social networking is not one of them.

Showing 4 comments

Shannie at 4:56am 25th January 2011 I can't wait either! I hope this phone is better then the iphone4 cause my friends have a lot of problems with their phone. I never had problems with my first IPhone that came out or the 3g
Elvis at 3:20am 25th January 2011 Live video and pictures streamed to the web. I assume the media or service will include location and geo tags. Nice! Now would be robbers or abductors will know exactly where you are and maybe more importantly where you are not, ie at home. Hopefully location information for that and find my friends is optional. Btw this type of service downsides is not unique to apple. Apple is usually more forthcoming about it and will provide a setting to disable location info.
Ferdos Yehedgo at 8:45pm 24th January 2011 tadaaaaaa,i phone 5 is on the way. Nice
ioman at 10:11am 24th January 2011 It doesn't sound like there will be that many new features, only on the software side and in production. Having multiple suppliers could be a headache for Apple is a part is defective. It would be hard to track down on their side, and for the consumer it would be a headache because only certain phones could have the defect. From a hardware standpoint, I assume the new iPhone 5 will support AT&T's faster 4G network and could support Facetime over it. Maybe a higher end camera?