The iPhone 5 Rumor Mill is Already Up and Running Into High Gear : Keypad? Yes Please!

Now that Apple has unveiled iOS 5, the media frenzy surrounding the next version of the iPhone is back with a vengeance. The paint's barely dry on Apple's newest iPhone, and rumors are already flying about what the next one's going to look like, when it will be released, and even how it will be seen as the late Steve Jobs' last great product.

One of the rumors that is consistently showing up though is the presence of a full physical keyboard. More specifically, a physical keypad of the slide-out variety. I absolutely love the iPhone, but my one dislike has always been the lack of a keypad. And the iPhone 4S released Friday was somewhat disappointing to Apple fans who waited longer than has been the pattern for the follow-up to last year's iPhone 4.

There’s a cult-like fascination with Apple product rumors, and that fascination turns into an obsession when it comes to iPhones. But now it appears that we've lost even the briefest of grace periods between an Apple product release and the beginnings of the whisper campaign about its successor. The iPhone in my mind has always been a wonderfully sleek and modern piece of technology.

To wit, Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar's latest research note, as cited by CNET, seems almost intentionally designed as a parody of the long-on-hyperbole, short-on-named-sources rumor-mongering about Apple's next big thing. We all know how emphatic iPhone users are about any slight issue with their phones, so a slide-out keypad seems downright terrifying in this respect.

This week’s flurry of iPhone rumors started with a Boy Genius Report story claiming that the iPhone 5 will be a radical departure from the iPhone 4. He believes the next iPhone will be unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in the summer of 2012, so can it really be true that Apple has signed off on the "final design" of a product that's eight months away or more from a first public showing?

We’ve been told to expect something that looks similar to the iPhone 4 but faster and with a better camera. And if so, why the heck didn't Apple just release the iPhone 5 last week instead of an iPhone 4S that has many complaining it doesn't add all that much new to the iPhone 4?

That's actually not all that bold, given Apple's streak of selling even more of its latest, greatest gadget than it did for the previous model a tradition that looks to be in full swing with the iPhone 4S, by the way.

Nobody ever went broke predicting that Apple would move a lot of product, not in the last several years, anyway.

Kumar also says the next Apple phone will be slimmer than the iPhone 4S, sport a larger screen despite having the same dimensions as the current smartphone, and finally have 4G-LTE. According to its sources, the iPhone 5 will be introduced in September, have an 8-megapixel camera and include the A5 processor. Bloomberg says that the September release date is meant to coincide with the release of iOS 5.