Rumour mill: iPhone 4G and a BlackBerry Slider?

By Nick Arnold

As the English Football Leagues come to a conclusion and the transfer window reopens the national newspapers are hot with rumours on possible player transfers and managerial sackings.

Away from football, the mobile industry is also rife with rumours on what the different manufacturers are doing in order to cement their share of the ever popular smartphone market. Here we take a look at a few of the bigger rumours circulating currently;

iPhone 4G/HD

The talk around the forums is not will there be a new iPhone?, but more when will the new iPhone be out and what will it do? Stories of a 5 megapixel camera complete with LED flash and HD video recording seem all the more likely after gadget website Gizmodo.com infamously ran the story of the lost and found iPhone 4G. (The story goes that an Apple employee left the iPhone 4G in a bar after a few sherbets. When a member of the public found it he called Apple to explain the situation and arrange the return of the device... unfortunately they didn’t believe him! He therefore did the next best thing and sold it to Gizmodo for a reported $5000. While a police investigation into the lost and found iPhone continues, expect more information on the iPhone 4G around June time.

BlackBerry 9800 Slider

While BlackBerry OS 6 is no longer a rumour (RIM's CEO Mike Lazaridis announced it at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium), there is plenty of talk around which device will run it first. Leaked images of a slide-style BlackBerry (unofficially dubbed the BlackBerry Slider 9800 by some) seem to show it running the operating system as well as featuring a full qwerty keyboard and a more user-friendly interface for browsing and the music player. There are no official details on the Slider although OS 6 is expected Q3 2010 so further details should be released before then.

Motorola Droid2

While the UK business and consumer markets haven’t seen anything of any note from Motorola for a while, it appears the Illinois-based company has been working hard on trying to crack the lucrative smartphone market, possibly with the assistance of Android OS. Rumours of a ‘Motorola Shadow’ possibly being the Google Nexus Two have been neither confirmed or denied and further rumours suggest their could be 2 devices around the same design, 1 with a keyboard and one without. Talk is of a specification boasting an 8MP camera, 4.3” Touchscreen and a HDMI port although expect to hear (and possibly see) more around June.