For the iOSsphere, it’s like the iPhone 4S never happened. The fever of speculation around the next Apple iPhone rises and ebbs like a great tide, ever restless.

This week: questioning Apple’s supremacy, LTE or Die, the rise in iPhone 5 Facebook scams, and why Apple turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the strong call from the faithful for NFC.

You read it here second.

“So, it’s probably not unreasonable to expect the iPhone 5 to be a ‘complete redesign,’ as the source said–meaning both externally and internally, though probably less so internally when compared with pronounced user-facing changes like the display size.”~ Brooke Crothers, CNET.com

iPhone 5 better have LTE…or else!

It was a headline sure to iGnite iPhanatics’s iRe: “TeliaSonera exec questions Apple’s supremacy.”

The exec in question is Tommy Ljunggren, senior vice president and head of system development for mobility services at TeliaSonera, that famous, big, important mobile carrier…in Sweden.  And boy did he question it, in an interview at Telecoms.com. 

“If you asked me two years ago I would have said Apple would be very important,” he said. “But now it will be a bad mistake not to include LTE in the iPhone 5 as otherwise they will really be run over by the others.”

Ljunggren went on to say, according to Telecoms, that:

* competitors are quickly catching up with Apple* the company’s supremacy in the handset space is coming into question* “They are not unique enough and there is disappointment over the 4S – it was too small a step for them.”

That did not sit well with 9to5Mac’s Christian Zibreg.  ”Ljunggren, of course, is confused and here’s why,” Zibreg said. but Zibreg doesn’t actually explain why. he just lays out numbers that show Apple’s success to date in the smartphone and tablet market worldwide. of course it’s had considerable success. Apparently the idea is that Apple is Too Successful to Fail. an idea which many people had until recently said about companies like, say, Nokia and RIM.

TeliaSonera isn’t exactly in the forefront of LTE deployment. Ljunggren admitted the carrier doesn’t currently support any LTE smartphones. TeliaSonera is waiting for “true LTE smartphones…not the ones that the US has right now with two radios.” that sounds like he’s questioning U.S. supremacy in…something.

The fake U.S. LTE smartphones “drain the batteries flat very quickly as they have one LTE terminal for data and a CDMA voice terminal. It’s basically a dongle and phone that they glue together. They work – just not for long!” That’s pretty good point, and Zibreg is spot-on to note that it’s a point Apple has been making for months: waiting for silicon that’s highly integrated, and power efficient, because it’s all about the User Experience.

iPhone 5 causing increase in Facebook scams and spams

ITWorld’s Dan Tynan explains in his blog post http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/215259/mythical-iphone-5-leads-real-facebook-scams how he received a Facebook message pointing to an allegedly faulty website that was “giving away an iphone5 to persons which are at face book for free…all they ask is your own thoughts and opinions about the I Phone5 and you can keep it permanently.” Tynan got a screen capture of the message. 

Grammar and other issues aside, that’s quite a deal, eh? Clicking on the included link brought you to a website offering to let you test the iPhone 5. and all you have to do is fill in some blank fields with your email address and shipping address.

“At best, sites like this suck down your data via  phony giveaways and then sell your info to lead gen companies,” Tynan writes. “Given the Russian pedigree (and the nonexistent product it was hawking), though, I’m betting it was a malware infection site. Just a hunch.”

Near Field Communications (NFC) on iPhone 5 is doomed by stupid people

Michael Nace, at iPhone5NewBlog, believes that Google Wallet and Visa and Isis and other “NFC payment platforms” have “put digital wallet technology on the map.”

“But a lack of consumer knowledge and interest in paying for goods with their smartphone may mean no NFC on the 2012 iPhone 5,” he writes. 

If only smart people could make the important decisions. “[W]hile avid smartphone enthusiasts are well aware of NFC, average smartphone users are either wary or unaware of the digital wallet concept,” Nace writes.

Nace has mastered use of the passive tense to make rumors and speculation seem unimpeachable. “With the advent of Google Wallet, it was assumed that Apple would answer in turn with its own proprietary digital wallet,” he writes. and why not, indeed?

“Yet, by the end of the WWDC [Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June], the unveiling of iOS 5 and iCloud seemed to have pushed away the strong call from iPhone users for NFC.”

A strong call from iPhone users. Yes. We can. Hope and Change. The Hallelujah NFC Chorus sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. to which Apple, incomprehensibly, turned a deaf ear.

Maybe they were listening instead to folks like Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal Mobile, whom Nace quotes in the story. she “warned during a panel discussion at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 conference last week that merchants have already been burned by the experience of paying for terminals to support NFC chips on credit cards, and only a miniscule portion of the population is actually using them nationwide.”

“It has to be assumed that Cupertino has kept an eye on these developments and, as a result, may see NFC adoption as a minefield,” Nace concluded.

That’s what we assume.

iPhone 5: a cult classic because it was Steve Jobs’ baby. and completely redesigned.

Here’s the reason why iPhone 4S is so lame: Steve Jobs wasn’t interested in it. he knew he was dying so he focused on the…iPhone 5. Which is going to be a complete redesign, and awesome and “will establish the high water mark for iPhone [sales] volumes.”

That’s the conclusion by Brooke Crothers, at CNET, quoting from a rumor note….sorry: a “research note” by one Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, and citing information from another source “who claims to have knowledge of the redesign.”

Kumar says the next iPhone “was the last project that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with from concept to final design.” Which makes it special. So it will become a “cult classic,” he says. Crothers’ source says the next iPhone “is a very large project that Steve dedicated all of his time to. he was not that involved in the 4S because his time was limited.”

“So, it’s probably not unreasonable to expect the iPhone 5 to be a ‘complete redesign,’ as the source said–meaning both externally and internally, though probably less so internally when compared with pronounced user-facing changes like the display size,” Crothers concludes.

So, it’s likely probably not unreasonable to not disbelieve someone who claims to know (after all why would he lie?) that the outside will be completely redesigned though the inside will be probably perhaps incompletely redesigned.

One thing we know for sure. The next iPhone will be different from the current iPhone.

iPhone 5 will have a 4-inch screen AND Retina Display.

A Korea Times report, picked up by ITProPortal among others, assures the iOSsphere that the iPhone 5 screen will be 0.3 inches or so bigger and support Apple’s pixel-dense Retina Display technology.

But it won’t support OLED, according to the KT story, citing as its source an “industry executive,” because of brightness and power consumption issues.

ITProPortal editor Desire Athow isn’t buying that last rumor. “That’s a slight contradiction given that OLED displays are known to be power sipping rather than power gulping and Apple will have to up the resolution on a 4-inch display in order to keep up with the retina display pixel density, which currently stands at 326ppi.”

KT also says iPhone 5 and iPad 3 will be released in the Spring of 2012; and the next iPhone will have a quad-core processor.

John Cox covers wireless networking and mobile computing for “Network World.”Twitter: http://twitter.com/johnwcoxnwwEmail: john_cox@nww.comBlog RSS feed: http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/2989/feed

Read more about anti-malware in Network World’s Anti-malware section.

iPhone 5 rumour roll up for the week ending October 21

iOS 5's new notification pull-down.

(Credit:Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

CNET has told you all about what’s new in Apple’s iOS 5 operating system and in the iPhone 4S that launched today, but this here’s a deep dive into the Notifications Center, one of the new features to hit iOS 5 for theiPhone,iPad, andiPod.

Pull down notificationsThe new notifications center is one of the biggest changes to iOS 5, and also among the best. Previously, if you missed or dismissed an alert, that’s it, it was gone. now you can place a finger at the information bar at the top of the screen and pull down to reveal a whole collection of messages, e-mail, reminders, calendar events, and other notifications you may have missed.

Comparisons with the pull-down menu in Android’s operating system have been plentiful, and I’ll get to them later on. but yes, the surface similarities are apparent.

The notification center here starts–by default–with a hatched gray background and is bookended by a Yahoo weather widget up top and a Yahoo stock ticket widget on the bottom. In between are your alerts, which are time-stamped, and which you can tap to open in the corresponding program.

When you’re done looking at them, you can temporarily clear an entire section from the list, but unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to clear one item at a time. That’s too bad, since this is definitely the place I’d expect to see Apple’s swipe-to-delete convention.

Another obvious point that Apple either disregarded or overlooked is a notification of what’s in the notification center. If you didn’t already know you’re meant to pull down an invisible bar, there’s no visual cue to indicate that you should do so. Yes, you’ll still get alerts that you’ve indicated you’d like, but there aren’t any flags, badges, or tickers along the top to let you know there’s a notification awaiting you, never mind which type. Keeping up to date required me to either pay close attention to my alerts, or maintain enough curiosity to pull down the bar to see what else was new.

Customize alerts to your heart's content, or at least until your patience runs out.

(Credit:Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Badges versus pop-up alertsA second major change is this: you can now choose between the traditional pop-up that takes over your screen until you handle it, and a newer style that materializes as an unobtrusive banner at the top of your screen. You can either address the banner directly (which opens the corresponding app), or ignore it and it’ll disappear.

In the Settings menu, a new Notifications entry lets you choose which style you want for each item–the banner, the pop-up (“alert”), or nothing at all. If you opt for “none,” you can still see the item in the notifications pull-down, but you won’t be pestered with a barrage of banners or pop-ups from more active apps like Twitter.

Customization galoreThe notification settings aren’t only for picking your alert type. It’s also where you decide which items you want in the notifications pull-down at all, in addition to how many items you’d like to see listed, if you’d like to view the alert from the phone’s lock scree, and whether you want sound on.

Here, you can also play around with the order in which notifications are displayed in the pull-down–kudos to Apple on this one. You’ll choose to sort the apps manually or chronologically. to sort them manually, tap Edit, then hold and drag the app name (Reminders, Calendar, CNET News) to its new location.

You’ll also see a list of apps that are eligible for, but not currently in, the notifications center. While you can always drag and drop between the two lists, it’s easier and much, much faster to just click into each entry and slide the toggle to the “on” or “off” position. Bam; done.

The one nettle amongst the clover is that there’s not quite as much granularity as there could be in the number of unread items you can view in the pull-down. for instance, I can choose to see 1, 5, or 10 unread e-mail items, but not 2 or 3, which would hit the sweet spot. I spent a good deal of time getting my notification settings just-so and it’s still a work in progress, but overall this is a huge leap forward from what notifications were before.

Lock screen notification in iOS 5.

(Credit:Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Lock screen bonanzaNotifications continue to show up on the lock screen as they come in, except this time they’re all visible. Before, you could only see one at a time, you had to deal with the alert before doing anything else on the phone, and once you closed one alert, you had to cycle through any others. now, you have the option of swiping immediately to reply, but if you let it sit, you can unlock your phone without being whisked away to an app. If there’s a voice message, you can swipe to listen.

Aping Android?So how closely does the iOS 5 notification center mirror Android? the biggest similarities are two-fold. There’s the action to pull down a tray that displays all of your notifications. but Android’s has a task bar that shows not just that you have an alert, but also the type of message you missed, with separate tiny icons that let you easily identify an incoming text, a missed call, a new voice mail, and so on. As with iOS 5, you can clear them all at once, but not individually.

Choose your own alert adventure!

(Credit:Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Android also originated the notification banner that shows you up top when you have a new message. Apple made theirs larger and more customizable, but Apple didn’t invent the convention. (Reminder: Android didn’t invent all its tools and visuals either. Companies have long been “borrowing” rivals’ ideas.)

Apple definitely borrowed heavily from Android notifications, and then expanded on what they could do. There’s much more depth in customizing the iOS 5 notifications, choosing what you see and how you see it, even whether you hear a sound alert for each item or not. the iOS widgety add-ons are great too, even though you may not necessarily want to follow stocks. Android has long some awesome notification bar extras, like music player controls and the ability to access phone setting like Wi-Fi and silent mode from the drop-down–however, Android just makes the latter available, and it’s up to the phone manufacturer if they actually implement it.

In addition, iOS 5′s new treatment of lock screen messages outpaces Android’s. You may hear a beep or a vibration on an Android phone, see an indicator light (if the phone has one), and note that a new icon or alert message has pop up in the task bar, but Apple’s lock screen messages put the alerts front and center–unless you disable this in the settings.

Tying it upFanboys and fangirls can argue all they’d like about which style they prefer–at the end of the day the way you like to see your messages is personal. for my part, I’m a fan of choice, and Apple has done a good job providing it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want even more customization–like changing the notification bar color, wanting icons in the task bar to let me know something’s new, hoping for more widgets in the Notifications tray, and even more options when it comes to picking the number of items I’d like to see from a given app–but this is undoubtedly a suite of features that I can get behind that really has the user in mind.

iOS 5 notifications: A deeper look