Predicting the iPhone 5

The iPhone 5 is set to be announced today. When I say today, I mean two weeks ago. But I write these things in advance, and by the time this blog post goes up, right now, it’ll already have been old news. People definitely have them already. I’m sure there were lines of people gathering outside of Apple stores around the country, people spending actual days out of their lives making absolutely sure that they could be granted the privilege of forking over hundreds of dollars for a product, probably only marginally cooler than last year’s model, that I could get just as easily by walking into any cell phone store the next day. These things never sell out.

But to have it first. That’s the dream right? Even if it’s just twelve hours, that’s twelve hours of getting to walk around town with an iPhone 5, making everyone using an iPhone 4S, or worse, and iPhone 4, or even worse, an iPhone 3GS, or even much, much, much, worse, some sort of an Android phone, feel like the complete losers that they know they already are.

But this isn’t about making fun of those losers without the iPhone 5. This is about me predicting all of the cool new features the iPhone 5 is going to have. I’m calling them right here, and like I said, I’m writing this before the announcement, so when I naturally call everything correctly, everyone is going to be like, “Yeah right Rob. I don’t believe you for a second. You probably wrote this after the announcement.” Whatever. Haters gonna hate, right?

My first prediction involves the screen. Specifically, instead of having a screen on one side, and a glass coating on the other side, the new iPhone is going to have a screen on one side, and another screen on the other side. That’s right, two screens. It’s going to be so cool. When you’re walking around with your new phone, you’ll be able to program all sorts of cool stuff to be displayed on the screen facing the rest of the world.

Like you could have the screen be an image of the iPhone home screen. And could you walk around going, “Hello? Hello?” really loudly. And some passerby might come up to you and say, “Hey, buddy, I think you’re holding your iPhone backwards,” and then you can just flip it around, revealing the other screen, and you can say something like, “Gotcha!” and that person will instantly realize that you’re using the iPhone 5. Classic. And then that person will take out their own much inferior phone, and they’ll look at it, unlock the touch screen, and then flip it around, just imagining what it would be like to have two screens, but their imagination isn’t capable of doing it, nobody’s is really, so they’ll just keep standing there, flipping it back and forth, not able to comprehend what it must be like for you, with your iPhone 5, two screens, playing pranks on random strangers.

And that’s only one possible application of the second screen. You could make the other side look like a picture of your ear. So that way people would think that it’s just a piece of glass, like looking right through the phone to your ear. They’re going to call it chameleon mode. It’s going to be nuts. Or, you could make it look like a picture of your brain, and people would say, “Whoa! I can totally see right through to your brain!” That’s going to be sick.

But the only problem is going to be the edges of the phone, the metal border. Honestly, what’s the point of having two screens if you have to look at a stupid piece of metal holding them together? That’s why on the iPhone 5, the border is going to be a screen also. It’ll be really thin, obviously, but it’ll be an actual screen. And there’s no limit to what you’ll be able to do with this wraparound screen. You could have a line of text scrolling around the edge, like a marquee, like if you’re on the phone and somebody walks up to you to try to talk, you could just run a loop of text, something like, “Uh, can’t you see that I’m on my iPhone 5?” And they’ll read it and get the message, literally.

But the iPhone, well, sometimes it’s a little two-dimensional, don’t you think? Haven’t you ever seen those phones that open up, and inside there’s like a keyboard or something? Well, I’m pretty sure the iPhone 5 is going to open up in the middle, but keyboards are so primitive. Inside there are going to be two more screens. So you’ll really have four screens. Four and a quarter screens if you count the screen that wraps around the outside of the phone.

Why four screens? Isn’t it obvious? How many times do you see people who have dropped their phones, and the whole screen shatters and splinters? It still works, but it’s really ugly and broken looking. With four screens, your iPhone should theoretically last four times as long. All you have to do is flip one of the halves inside out.

But it gets even better. The two halves can actually separate into two thinner independent phones. So if you’re really bored, all you have to do is find twenty-six other people, get them together, and you can all run this app where each half becomes one card in a deck. That way you can all start playing card games. Well, some of you can take turns playing card games. I don’t know any twenty-six person card games. But, bonus, if you find hundreds of people with iPod Nanos, you can program each Nano to look like a poker chip, and you can use those to gamble.

Yeah, you’re probably reading this and thinking that there’s no way that I called it all. But I did. I’m telling you, they’re not launching the iPhone 5 until later today. I’ve written this before, but it’s worth repeating, that right after Steve Jobs died, his genius energy must have been transferred by the universe into me, because there has to be one genius inventor alive at all times, and I’ve been selected, because I totally called it.