Apple appears to be cooking a new and exciting feature for iPhone, it’s call speech to text. Imaging having to do away with sometimes annoying keyboard and just spell a text message, email or whatever text you want and your iPhone will do the rest. Cool huh?

According to a recent patent, Apple is working on speech to text technology for it iPhone and iPod devices.
The Baltimore Sun included the following diagram of how the text to speech system would work when wording an email.

From the patent filing

The speech recognition module can analyze the speech data to derive text data, the text data comprising sequence information associated with each of a plurality of words associated with the speech data. The text composition module can receive the text data and combine the text data with the non-speech data based upon the sequence information. The text composition module can thereby produce combined text data derived from the text data and the non-speech data. The interface can transmit the combined text data to the mobile device for presentation to a user of the mobile device.

It has been long tough that iPhone is available on China, although it’s not true. This is probably the reason why the Hi-Phone or HiPhone is still a big hit over there. This is about to change after China Unicom signed a 3 years deal with Apple to finally bring the iPhone to massive Chinese market. China Unicom will be able to over 2 types of iPhone to whooping 141 millions customers. Specs and price of the iPhone is not yet revealed and we are wondering how Apple or China Unicom will be able to market such an expensive gadget.

The lastest news suggest the deal may not be exclusive to China Unicom, as it’s the case in other countries.

Apple appears to have waited for Steve Jobs to come back from his medical leave to announce that the company has sold over 1 million iPhone on the first weekend of it launch. Apple has already expected high demand for the new iPhone 3GS, but the number of sales appears to have broken the records of the first iPhone. In Apple’s press release: (more…)

Cheaper version of iPhone?

Apple is expected to show a new and cheaper version of iPhone at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2009 or WWDC, the Financial Times reported. It’s not yet clear if it’s the $99 or $149 version, but there are rumours of 4GB iPhone model with cheaper tariff. These will likely be announced only for AT&T in the US, with plans to follow for Europe and other markets. Monday should be a big day for iPhoners.

iPhone Facing Camera

A new spy picture has been released by the guys at Spaziocellulare.com showing the iPhone with a facing camera. The same design available for many phones offering video calling. If this holds true, it will confirm the rumours circulating the net in the last few months that the next iPhone will have video version of iChat. (more…)

Following a recent interview of Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo by Almar Latour regarding the iPhone’s impact on the mobile phones market, Kallasvuo admitted that the release of the iPhone was a “Wake up call” to his company. They spoke about a new Nokia device in the pipeline, the Nokia N97 and the opening of Nokia’s own app store. This is Nokia’s initiative to position itself back as a leading mobile phones and service company with an applications store.

An online Chinese store is offering what looks like the next generation of Apple iPhone expected July 17 as per a previous post. The print screen on the side shows LCD display and bezel parts, which casts doubts of the rumours that the next iPhone will have an OLD screen. The speakers seems to have been moved up the fascia of the handset. The parts also show the difference between the current and the 3rd-gen LCD connections.However, other rumours suggests that Apple is probably planning 3 version of the new iPhone, including one that will be available for the Chinese market. In which case, the LCD display could be for some and not all versions.

Rumours has it that it’s very likely Apple is working on new version of iPod nano which will include a camera, same one as it currently available on iPhone, only in awkward position. We think this is kind of expected as Apple seems to move every new and successful feature available on the iPhone to the next release of iPod. We have seen no report of a camera going to iPod Touch. This is unlikely because Apple likes to keep the iPhone as the daddy and mummy of all it portable devices, featuring all the cool features users are after.  The picture on the side from iLounge shows an artist’s rendition of the next possible iPod nano. Quick question though, how are you supposed to hold the nano to take pictures? bearing in mind that there is no touch screen. We think iPod touch will be a better candidate. What do you think?