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The new iPhone - will it have a keyboard?

A year ago, NewsWireless forecast a new model iPhone for June 2009; and today, the reports from Chinese factory sources say "New model May..." That means, we may have a chance to be proved very wrong about the other half of our prediction: that the new machine would include at least one model with a pull-out keyboard.

The factory, says James Ridler, is that of TSCM (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), which "has been given orders for parts including GSM/EDGE power amplifiers, Bluetooth circuits and the 3.2-megapixel OmniVision CMOS image sensors that have been rumoured for the next iPhone."

But Ridler's source is Digitimes, widely appreciated for its ability to discover rumours in industries, and Digitimes itself says "mid-2009" rather than May. Shipments are possibly starting in May, says Claire Sung; but the retail channel rarely springs into instant action like that.

Keyboards on iPhones are an instant source of fury from True Believers, who know that the touch-screen interface on their favourite toy is the best possible. They dismiss as simple heresy the idea that some customers' perverse desire for keys that go click, or keys which don't obscure the display, could be pandered to.

But mobile operators see things differently, of course; if they have a big corporate customer which has a spec list with tick boxes, and the tick boxes include "full qwerty pullout keyboard" then they'll tell the phone maker what the requirements are.

The prolem for Apple, is rather harder to solve. OK, suppose Vodafone says it has a "potential" four million customers for an iPhone with pullout keyboard; does that actually mean that if Apple ships a million iClick iPhones, Vodafone will really take orders for a million?