The iPhone 4G rumour mill is ramping up

With the iPad barely out of the door, speculation has already started about the next Apple gadget and, yes, it’s the iPhone 4G.

A report in The Wall Street Journal yesterday is the latest to fan the fire, although the piece is short on fact s and long on speculation, even going as far as to make the bold (and awkwardly phrased) claim that “Apple Inc. plans to begin producing this year a new iPhone…”

The piece prompted Apple pundit John Gruber to diss the WSJ article on his Daring Fireball blog with a post that reads:

“And they have no actual details of the next-generation iPhone. Nothing. Not the A4-family CPU system-on-a-chip. Not the 960 x 640 double-resolution display. Not the second front-facing camera. Not even the third-party multitasking in iPhone OS 4. All they have is that there’s going to be a new iPhone this summer, period.”

That’s pretty much Gruber has to say on the matter and he makes no mention of where his information comes from. This hasn’t stopped other tech blogs from repeating his specifications, but that odd resolution has led to another couple of interesting tidbits.

First, 9to5Mac points out that 960 x 640 is a good match for the 960 x 540 ‘iFrame’ resolution that Apple recently added to iMovie via a recent update — one quarter the size of a Full 1080p HD image. The guess at the time was that the new format would be a good one for scaled-down HD video on a widescreen tablet device and the supposed iPhone 4G resolution’s extra 100 vertical pixels is just enough for a status bar across the top of the screen.

Second, a video has also surfaced that appears to show a slightly larger “iPhone 4G” screen component being handled. The screen looks like the one shown in ‘leaked’ photos from earlier this year by Smartphone Medic and it appears to have a cut-out for a front-mounted video camera, but it’s far from concrete proof.

One thing is certain about the iPhone 4G, though — we haven’t heard the last of it.