One hundred and fifty. That’s approximately how many days away we are from iPhone 5 (assuming Apple sticks to it’s mid-summer refresh scedule), yet as mainstream a website as CNN.com (via Mashable) is already posting “rumor round-up” stories.

Crazy.

The tone of the story (reported there and elsewhere) is that Apple will be making changes to the iPhone in order to somehow squash the raging bull of Android sales. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think Apple makes products they think will sell like crazy and very purposefully doesn’t fixate on the competition. I’m not saying nobody over there thinks about market share, but it’s not the way they measure success. Apple likes to be insanely profitably and insanely great. Market share’s for show-offs.

So anyway, here are the new features the new Jesus Phone will supposedly have:

• A higher megapixel camera. Maybe. The iPhone already has a kick-ass camera. Megapixels aren’t everything. The lens and processing software are arguably more important than the size of the image being recorded. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more MPs in the next phone, but not because Apple’s playing a “who’s got the best specs” game.
• Larger screens. Again, maybe. There was a rumor a little while back that the iPhone would be losing it’s home button, but I think Gruber nailed it. I don’t expect that button to be going anywhere. So, if the screen’s physically bigger, it will not get that way by stealing space away from the phone’s “chin”. It’s possible they’d steal space from it’s “forehead”, but it seems to me that the screen would still need the same number of physical pixels as the current screen (only larger). One of the things that makes the iPhone easy to develop for is that it’s screen comes in two sizes: 640 x 960 for iPhone 4 and exactly half that (320 x 480) for all the others. It seems to me they wouldn’t want to introduce a third size not based on those proportions. Besides, the Retina Display is not even a year old and massively beautiful. Seems early for a big shake-up around the screen.
• Slide-out keyboard. No. I think Jobs would have to be way more than just on medical leave for that to happen. He’d have to be stone-cold dead and five years buried. Plus, Jonathan Ive would have to have been kidnapped by Chechen rebels and held in a mountain top lair. I just can’t see this happening ever.

There’s also a rumor of a smaller “iPhone nano” floating out there again. Not sure about that. Seems to me the icons and other chrome on the current phone is about as small is it can get and still be useable. Unless they’re dreaming up a non-app phone, like an iPod nano with a phone attached as opposed to what we have now which is like an iPod Touch with a phone. Not sure moving away from the App Store ecosystem is a direction they’re likely to go. Also smells too much like a feature phone.

I guess we’ll know in about 150 days (assuming one doesn’t show up in bar first).