GADGET: The iPhone 6 rumour round up!

With Apple’s iPhone 6 still some months away, we thought we’d trawl the deepest, darkest parts of the Internet to round up all the rumours regarding Apple’s next iPhone.

As with anything rumour-related you should take everything with a pinch of salt – but if even half of them come true the next iPhone should be something quite special.

Having increased the screen size of the last iPhone, Apple might be tempted to go even bigger. According toBusiness Insider there are “several” iPhone 6 prototypes doing the rounds at Cupertino, with one of them reportedly sporting a 4.8-inch screen. Apparently the new screen tech comes from Sharp and could see the screen resolution topping out at 1080p.

And to add even more fuel to the fire Got To Be Mobile reckon Apple might consider splitting the iPhone 6, like they did with the iPhone 5c and 5s, and satisfy consumers who want a large Phablet-style iPhone and those of us who still want a stunningly svelte iPhone.

Alongside a decent bump in screen size, rumours have also suggested that the new iPhone 6 could be substantially thinner and lighter. It’s thought Apple might be reworking the LED backlight spec and opting for a 0.45t side-view type LED instead of the current 0.6t side-vide type LED – meaning a thinner, lighter iPhone. This all comes from LED Inside who have apparently sounded out sources close to Apple’s supply chain.

Elsewhere Apple could be planning to hide the external facing components using a new-fangled screen called polymer-dispersed liquid crystal, which has been unearthed by Patent Scope.

Basically: an electric current is used to change the opacity of the window – so while your iPhone 6 rests on the side not in use it will look like a wafer thin slice of uninterrupted beauty.

Potentially in the future, Apple could feasibly use the technology to hide various features – such a cameras, solar panels, fingerprint or Iris scanners – within the phone behind a changing PDCL window.

The amount of screen protectors and cases on the market for mobile phones is truly staggering, which leads us nicely onto the next rumour: scratch proof screens.

It looks like a scratch-proof future could be upon us according to the clever bods over at 9 To 5 Mac, who reckon Apple has struck a deal to open and operate a manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona related to sapphire crystal components – could this mean better screen protection on the iPhone 6? We sure hope so.

Less likely but a whole lot more interesting is something called ‘A lens actuator module’ which has been uncovered in one of Apple’s many recent patent claims. In plain English, the new iPhone 6 could have a camera lens that can actually move independently of the camera – which would dramatically improve image stabilisation meaning blurry photos could be a thing of the past.

Another Apple patent uncovered at the time of the iPhone 5s rumour mill was for a wireless power utilisation. Again, in English, this means wireless charging and would be a big improvement over the current technology, which requires users to put their handsets on a pad in order to charge them, which if you ask us is just cheating really.

The new technique being developed by Apple could charge a larger amount of devices at the same time as it uses something called Near Field Magnetic Resonance (NFMR).

“The wireless powered local computing environment includes at least a near field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power supply arranged to wirelessly provide power to any of a number of suitably configured devices,” reads the patent application.

Obviously it didn’t make it for the iPhone 5s – but just maybe it could happen the iPhone 6? Only time will tell.

iPhone 6 mock-up images courtesy of Martin Hajek and Steve Hemmerstoffer