Need handbook

Korean site ETNews.com claims that Apple is planning to use new "liquid metal" alloys in the iPhone 5 to yield a thinner and lighter device that is resistant to impact damage. Appleacquired the rights to Liquidmetal Technologies "amorphous metal alloys" in August 2010 and soon after was spotted hiring engineers to work on the materials, but little concrete news on Liquidmetals contributions to Apple has appeared since that time.
The report also claims that the iPhone 5 will debut in June at Apples Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), returning to the mid-year launch schedule seen up until last years launch of the iPhone 4S in October. Most observers expect, however, that the iPhone 5 will not launch until the later September-October timeframe this year as well. 

ETNews does not have a lengthy track record regarding Apple rumors, although the site did incorrectly claim last year that the iPhone would launch in late June with a special event several weeks after WWDC. The site appears to have been more accurate with its January claim that Sharp had been cut out of the supply chain for the display in the new iPad. Sharp did experience difficulties meeting Apples quality control standards for the display production, and is only now ramping up production to help meet demand. 

Based on the sources unreliable track record, the preponderance of expectations pointing to a release later in the year, and a lack of corroborating claims regarding Apples plans for Liquidmetals alloys, we believe that this rumor is not particularly reliable. Consequently, we are posting this claim to our blog primarily for reader interest and discussion.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop hinted during an interview with Australian Financial Review that his company will be venturing once more to the tablet category.

Back in 2007, years before the iPad, Nokia introduced the N800 Internet Tablet, which was followed by the N801 the year after. They looked more like phablets by today’s standards and like other tablets before the iPad, they did not take off well.

“We haven’t announced tablets at this point, but it is something we are clearly looking at very closely,” Elop told the newspaper. “We are studying very closely the market right now as Microsoft has introduced the Surface tablet, so we are trying to learn from that and understand what the right way to participate would be and at what point in time.”

It is pretty inevitable that Nokia’s future tablet will run on Windows, especially that Microsoft is Nokia’s partner in its Lumia line of smartphones. However, Elop is not discounting the possibility of developing a Nokia tablet that runs on Android, but they might be late in the game.

“On the Android side, we were very worried that we would be entering Android late relative to everyone else in the industry, that perhaps one vendor was already well on the road to being the dominant Android vendor at the expense of everyone else,” Elop added. “If we look back two years to when we made the decisions, then Samsung was big, HTC was pretty big, and Motorola was pretty big. Of course, what has happened in the two years is that Samsung has captured the lion’s share of it and the others have been squeezed down to much smaller market share. We were worried about exactly that pattern forming.”