New Dock Connector To Be Called “Lightning” And Other Pre-Launch Rumors

It’s now mere hours before the iPhone 5 gets announced, and rumors are flying around like absolutely nobody’s business. With almost no time to go before everything gets official, we’ve still just found out a bunch of new rumors that are pretty exciting.

9to5Mac has put together a bumper crop of these, and their sources indicate:

• The new miniature dock will be called “lightning”, to match with the thunderbolt port — here’s hoping it’s fast enough to live up to the name.
• The redesigned earbuds will be called “earpods”
• There will be a few different variants of the mini dock adapter, depending on how big you need it to be, “The first version apparently clips onto the bottom of the new iOS devices. The second is a version with a little cable attached for accessories like tight-fitting cases.”
• The new iPod Shuffle will stay at 2GB, and come in “pink, yellow, blue, green, purple, silver, ‘slate’ and red.”
• The iPod Touch will have its storage doubled
• There will be a new, colorful accessory for the iPod Touch called the “loop”.

Whew, that’s a lot of information! Let’s see what else is being talked about.

Developer/hacker Chronic believes that the new iPhone may have NFC, but that it might not be there for payment purposes.

The Wall Street Journal had a throwaway line in a recent piece that could mean the addition of a much needed feature to iOS (emphasis added).

That software, iOS 6, includes improvements to voice-activated assistant Siri, a new digital-coupon-and-passes service called Passbook, and new call-blocking features, among several others.

Anyone who has ever had to deal with robo calls and phony debt collection agencies will be happy about that if true.

Finally, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo thinks the new iPod Touch is in for a major overhaul, with new colors, 4-inch display, GPS, a better camera, A5 chip, and the ability to function as a game controller for larger pieces of hardware.

Well folks, in about four hours you’ll know how accurate all of these reports are, as we all wait with bated breath for the big announcements!