The first purported sightings of NFC hardware have shown up on what it being touted as the most complete leak of the iPhone 5 yet. Could iWallet really see full implementation in 2012 after all?
The summer of 2012 has featured part after part of the purported iPhone 5 coming out in drips and drabs. One of the most conspicuous absences in these photos, however, has been the inclusion of chips, which would ostensibly give us a much better view of what to expect from this year’s iPhone. A newly leaked photo, however, seems to be showing off a small chip that could very well be NFC, all amidst a new parts dump that is being called the most complete leak we’ve seen yet.
According to SlashGear:
The photos of the apparently assembled front panel of the new smartphone, discovered on a Photobucket account, include a hitherto-unseen square component covered with EMI shielding, that’s tipped to be a near-field communications chip. . . Macotakara identified the potential component, with AppleInsider suggesting the dimensions fit with super-compact chips such as the 5 x 5 mm models offered by NXP. That company already supplies Samsung for the Galaxy Nexus’ NFC implementation and is believed to also power Sony’s NFC-enabled phones.”
One of Apple's NFC patent sketches
What I find most compelling about the chip is its placement. If you recall from previous articles where we posted photos of Apple’s NFC patents, the NFC hardware technology was always represented as being positioned somewhere near the top of the device. The difference with this current leak and schematics on the patents is only that the current NFC chip appears to be right of the earpiece — in the original drawings, they represented it on the left. But one could imagine that this shift could be superfluous.
Still not present in any of these leaked photos is a glimpse of the processor. A discussion of the main chip for the iPhone 5 has largely disappeared from the conversation, after a lot of conjecture about it after the release of the iPad 3 and its A5X chip. The New iPad features a dual-core CPU and quad-core GPU in order to process its retina display. It still remains to be seen if Apple will deploy quad-core technology in the iPhone 5 or not.
It’s strange — just how many things are strange this iPhone season — how Apple would allow the NFC component of the iPhone 5 to leak, but not the processor. For those who are anticipating the iPhone 5, it can be said that NFC would make more of a splash feature-wise than, say, a retina display, since users have already had a chance to see the retina display in action on the New iPad and MacBook Pros.
Either the iPhone 5 fakes are getting more elaborate, or Apple has doubled down on losing control of its own product development security.
It’s also not hard to imagine that the claim that the iPhone 5 will feature a headphone jack on the bottom of the device could have something to do with the inclusion of the NFC hardware at the top of the device. The logic here might be that when users point their device at an NFC receiver, they’ll do it with the top of the phone, not the bottom.
And if the NFC hardware in the top of the device is bulky enough, it could have been the motivating design factor in moving the headphone jack to the bottom.
By Michael Nace
Source : iphone5newsblog[dot]com
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