(By Balaseshan) Despite iPhone 5 seeing production issues, fresh speculation has surfaced that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) will begin trial manufacturing of the next generation iPhone, dubbed as iPhone 5S, in December.
According to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report, Apple is rumored to begin trial production of iPhone 5S in December with initial production of 50,000 to 100,000 units.
For Apple, the "S" release of each iPhone has been seen as a minor update, according to the Geek. Typically, there's an upgrade to the processor or camera with the next version of the iOS but the phone itself isn't fundamentally changed.
Apple, which is facing low yield rates in the production of iPhone 5, has accelerated the certification processes for related parts and components for the iPhone 5S, the paper reported.
While the rumored iPhone 5S is anticipated to enter volume production in the first quarter of 2013, Apple will likely release a new version of iPad a quarter later than the iPhone 5S, since its latest version of iPad has lower than expected display resolution, the paper added.
Apple iPhone 5S is rumored to sport 4.0 inches LED-backlit IPS TFT capacitive display, a 1.2-to-1.5 GHz dual or quad-core A7 chip with 1GB or more of RAM, iOS 7, 12 megapixel dual-LED flash 3D camera and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera for video chat.
iPhone 5S will likely feature scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla glass, aluminum plate casing, oleophobic coating, accelerometer, gyroscope, and proximity sensor.
It is expected that the Apple smartphone will come with 16/32/64 GB internal storage and an external microSD card support. It is expected that iPhone 5S will have a better battery when compared to the Li-Po 1440 mAh battery in iPhone 5.
It is also anticipated that the next-generation iPhone will have Apple's recent victory of patents including patents for iPhone 3D modeling application, iChat video-conferencing, LTE, Cover Flow, multi-touch, iDevice camera face detection, and a patent relating to voice commands that has likely been rolled into Siri architecture.
AAPL is trading down 0.57% at $543.94 on Monday. The stock has been trading between $363.32 and $705.07 for the past 52 weeks.