This time next week, the iPhone 5 rumor frenzy will be over and we'll finally know what Apple plans to release. I imagine there will even be an iPhone 6 rumor or two floating around. But until then, we still have several days to wildly speculate about what the next-gen iPhone will include.

An invite to Apple's October 4 press event finally landedin journalists' inboxes on Tuesday afternoon, and it said simply: "Let's talk iPhone." That one phrase prompted the blogosphere and analysts like Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster to speculate that Apple will add a long-rumoredvoice recognition feature to iOS 5.

"In the past, Apple has used its invitation to include cryptic hints as to what it will announce," Munster wrote in a letter to investors. "The phrase on this year's invite, 'Let's talk iPhone,' may be a simple play on words, but may also refer to new speech-based features for the iPhone."

Last year, Apple acquired voice-recognition application startup Siri and added some voice-to-text features to iOS 4, so an enhancement to those features wouldn't be too surprising.

Atop many an iPhone 5 wish list, meanwhile, is support for 4G LTE speeds. Verizon started rolling out its LTE network in December and AT&T just lit up LTE in five cities earlier this month, so why wouldn't Apple want to take advantage of these blazing-fast speeds? In a word: style.

Current LTE chips are a bit bulky and would force Apple to increase the size of its iPhone, something it is reportedly not willing to do. Slimmer chips from Qualcomm are not expected to hit the market until next year, so we probably won't see LTE until the iPhone 6. What will we get? A China Unicom execsaid this week that the iPhone 5 will support HSPA+ 21, which is kind of like 4G lite. It's faster than 3G (21Mbps vs. 7.2Mbps) but it's not as fast as LTE.

The choice to have Apple's press event at its headquarters rather than a larger venue in San Francisco has prompted some talk that Tuesday's event will be a more low-key affair, and possibly only include the launch of the smaller "iPhone 4S," rather than the iPhone 5. Well, iPhone 3GS users who have been waiting patiently for a major upgrade will be glad to hear that AT&T stores have reportedly received cases for the iPhone 5, not the 4S.

A Macrumors reader sent the blog photos of cases that have showed up at AT&T retail stores. "Like other cases for the rumored redesign of the iPhone 5, these cases appear to show a tapered design and the mute switch moved to the opposite side of the device," Macrumors said.

The carrier drama continued, meanwhile, with T-Mobile essentially confirming that it will not offer the iPhone 5 this year.

Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief marketing officer, penned a blog post in which he discussed the carrier's desire to offer the iPhone, but said it's probably not going to happen in the near future.

"Please know that we think the iPhone is a great device and Apple knows that we'd like to add it to our line-up," Brodman wrote. "Today, there are over a million T-Mobile customers using unlocked iPhones on our network. We are interested in offering all of our customers a no-compromise iPhone experience on our network."

Despite that interest, "for now, our focus continues to be giving customers the best that Android has to offer," Brodman wrote.

iPad and iPod?
We know we'll probably get some sort of new iPhone next week, but what about the iPad? Another rumor making the rounds is that the long-awaited official Facebook iPad app will finally make its debut at next week's Apple event.

Apple's fall events have traditionally focused on the company's iPod lineup. With the music player now wrapped into the iPhone, it makes sense that Apple will one day wind down production of its standalone MP3 players, but will that day be October 4? Not quite. TUAW said this week that Apple is moving toward having a touch screen on every iPod and will ditch the Classic and the shuffle.

Losing track of all the Apple iPhone 5 rumors? For more, see last week's top rumors, as well as thosefrom the week before. Also check out What the iPhone 5 Might Look Like and Six Amazing Phone Technologies We Want in iPhone 5, as well as the 8 Likely iPhone 5 Rumors, and 2 Wild Ones slideshow below.

Source - [ pcmag.com ]