Every time I read a rumor, I forget to take it with the so-called ‘grains of salt’ and instead read it as fact.  I’m sure I’m not the only one making this mistake, or at least I hope not.  The problem with the tech world that we live in is that long before a new product is ready to hit the market, rumors, pictures and ‘people familiar with the matter’ all reach consumers first.  Once this happens, the consumers (including myself) hear these rumors, start to build their own picture of the device, and then forget that that picture is based purely on speculation.  This happens all the time, and is especially problematic when involving the iPhone 5.

Launch Date
Has it been confirmed that the iPhone 5 will launch this September? If so, will it be early in the month like BGR says, or later according to Gizmodo? Or neither, and instead launching in October like AllThingsD just posted? My point here is that no matter how many times we hear that “the iPhone 5 will launch this (insert month here),” we are still yet to hear from Apple.  Therefore we cannot single out one week, or even month, this fall to predict when the iPhone 5 will arrive.  Also, by arrive I mean go on sale, not be announced.

Screen Size
It’s a no brainer that the iPhone 5 will have a 4″ screen, right? Or wait, was it a 3.7″ screen? Either way, a bigger screen is coming for sure, I think.  Now you’re thinking, “but Jason, weren’t pictures of an iPhone 5 case just released that were bigger than an iPhone 4 case, meaning the iPhone 5 will have a bigger screen?” Of course they were, but are they real? Exactly.

Phone Size
Here is an even bigger question: with a larger screen, will the phone itself be larger? At first, we heard no.  It was thought that the iPhone 5 would have the shell of an iPhone 4 with updated guts and a bigger screen.  But then BGR decided that the iPhone 5 would instead be a radically new design, leading to rumors about a taller, wider iPhone that would fit in the case below on the right.  We shall see…

Phone Backing
Will the iPhone 5 rock a flat, glass back like the iPhone 4? Or will it look similar to the plastic backing of the iPhone 3G and 3GS? What about a metal back, reminding us of the original iPhone from ’07?  These are all great questions, but according to a new knockoff found in China, none of the above will be the case.  This knockoff is said to look just like the iPhone 5, and it features a curved, glass backing, almost like an iPhone 4/3GS hybrid. An image of this new design is waiting below.  Again, we shall see…

Thinness
Could the iPhone 5 really be any thinner than the iPhone 4? Better yet, could anything really be thinner than the iPhone 4 and still be comfortable to hold? I’m not so sure, but I guess a few millimeters smaller couldn’t hurt.  But will it be tapered, like this design? I don’t know, but am I the only one reminded of the MacBook Air here?

Home Button
Will the iPhone 5 feature a home button?  After all, this is what makes an iPhone an iPhone, or has in the past.  Is it possible that we will see a new gesture based area that replaces the iPhone’s home button?  Yes, so MacRumors reported back in April.  However, they later updated that report and called it untrue, further proving that the rumor mill is a very unreliable and unpredictable thing to follow, and should never be taken as fact.

Camera
This is an interesting one.  It’s been posted before that the iPhone 5 will have an 8 megapixel camera supplied by OmniVision and Sony.  If I had to pick one of these rumors to be the most solid, this would be it.  As for now though, this is still an unknown and can be added to the list of iPhone 5 rumors that cannot be taken as fact.

Mute Switch and Volume Buttons
The simple question here is will the iPhone 5 feature volume buttons like the iPhone 4 or a rocker like previous generations?  Digging deeper reveals something that could falsify every rumor we have heard thus far, and could even lead one to believe that the leaked iPhone 5 cases are indeed fake.  In the pictures of the supposed iPhone 5 cases below, the mute switch has been moved to the right side of the iPhone.  No big deal, this could just be a space saver to allow the next-gen iPhone to be thinner.  But, remember the extremely blurry picture that 9to5Mac received from a source, claiming they were of an iPhone he had never seen before? Well, we’ve got that picture below too, and if you look closely, it has a mute switch on the left side of the iPhone, the same as iPhones today.

Either that man was looking for fame, that iPhone in the picture is not the iPhone 5 but instead something else, or all of the iPhone 5 cases with the mute switch on the right side are wrong.  Take a minute to let that sink in, and hopefully now you are realizing that this entire list of iPhone 5 unknowns is based on all rumors and no facts.

It’s a crazy world we live in today.  New rumors come out every minute, some disappearing as soon as they arrived and others making their way to the headlines of every major tech blog.  But no matter how many times a rumor is posted and seems to be real, it can be shot down just as quickly.  I wish I knew all there was to know about the iPhone 5, I wish it was announced at WWDC 2011, and I wish I had one now.  But I don’t, it wasn’t, and I’ll have to wait until (insert month here) before I can.