I guess because that wasn’t 100% true.

The thing is, while we almost never had advanced knowledge confirming new products, we were all engrossed by the Mac news / rumor sites. Although we were contractually obligated not to contribute to them, nothing stopped us from talking and speculating to one another during lunch or at the bar after work. As an employee you get to know Apple’s psychology pretty well and it was often easy to tell which stories were real and which were fake.

So while we didn’t officially know what was coming down the pipeline, it was often the case that we “knew”; but we still couldn’t talk about it. There is a certain amount of buzz to rumors combined with timing and the company’s actions that would make it clear that something was up.

Recently sites have been talking about the next iPhone being only a mild upgrade and referring to it as the “iPhone 4S”. For as long as it has been around I’ve HATED this rumor.

There seems to be an assumption that because there was an iPhone 3Gs to follow iPhone 3G that Apple is going to repeat this pattern and even call it the “iPhone 4S”. The major flaw in this conclusion is so obvious it boggles my mind that sites miss it.

The iPhone 4′s “4″ in its branding is different than the 3G’s “3″. The 4 in the iPhone 4 represents it being the fourth model of iPhone whereas the 3 in the iPhone 3G represented the 3G speed of its connection.

Apple is a company tightly fixated on branding, even if the next upgrade were a small one they simply wouldn’t just slap an “s” on the end of the “iPhone 4″ and call it a day instead of releasing an iPhone 5. Regardless of what the marketing name would be, it would still be the 5th model of the phone. They especially wouldn’t then just call the next phone the “iPhone 5″ the following year as it would actually be the 6th version and so on. The logic is broken.

Branding aside, it also seems clear to me that after waiting more than a year Apple’s going to do more than a modest bump to the iPhone. While the iPhone 4 is doing extremely well after 15 months on the market the changes will need to be significant if only to keep consumers interested and competitors behind. The rumors of a larger screen, better camera and a tapered form factor seem to gel with that.

Meanwhile the now two year old iPhone 3GS is the second best selling phone on the market. It is clear Apple benefits from giving customers the choice of a lower-priced option. This one-two punch has served them well at retaining market share in the face of Android so the logical conclusion would be that an iPhone 5 will be announced this fall and Apple will keep the iPhone 4 around discounted like they did the 3GS.

But the rumor is that the next iPhone is also now coming to Sprint and T-Mobile too, which would make sense. Problem is T-Mobile’s 3G network uses a different frequency than AT&T so if Apple wants to support them they need to introduce either a separate phone for their network or a phone with a chip that is compatible with both networks. Meaning they’d have to manufacture three different iPhone 5s for the 4 different carriers and that’s not counting storage sizes or colors and this still leaves them without a low cost option on T-Mobile’s network.

Then I start thinking about this and the fact that before the Verizon iPhone 4 was launched there were all sorts of antenna redesigns that leaked that contained SIM card slots, which the Verizon phone does not and now suddenly similar things are showing up again.

All signs seem to be pointing at it but no one seems to notice. My gut says that Apple is planning to launch not one but two new iPhones this fall and both will be available on all four major US carriers. I believe we will see a mildly revamped iPhone 4 and an “all-new” iPhone 5.

Apple will however downplay the 4′s revamp with a comment like “the iPhone 4 has proven to be the most popular phone in history and it’s not slowing down so today we’re making it available to T-Mobile and Sprint customers too”. No new name, and no upgraded specs they’ll want the press to focus on the iPhone 5, not a bunch of internal changes to a 15 month old device.

How will they do this? Instead of individual models for individual carriers I believe that both the revised 4 and the new 5 will have both CDMA and GSM chips in them will be compatible with all four carriers right out of the box.

Externally this does away with customer confusion as most people don’t know / understand / care about the differences between cellular networks and frequencies, they simply want to buy a phone and have it work. Secondly, this dramatically simplifies their product line, inventory and manufacturing and allows them to further leverage the economies of scale that CEO Tim Cook so masterfully does already.

Wouldn’t be half bad for his first public move as CEO either.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

We arrived in Berlin at around 9 am and luckily Mouse found us almost immediately. We traveled around a bit and attempted to find a SIM card to use in the unlocked iPhone I acquired before leaving. Turns about it’s just about impossible to get a prepaid data plan that will work with the iPhone, so it looks like I might be forced to use AT&T’s exorbitant rates.

The place we are staying at is pretty awesome. “78″ is a legally owned collective house with approximately 50 inhabitants. Each tenant seems to take pride in their home and respects eachother, that said the place is this beautiful mix of disaster and work in progress. Every corner screams potential.

After an extended nap we head over to Forki park, rested and conversed with Mouse’s friends. Finally we got ahold of Tex and agreed to meet up at the Alexanderplatz. Here I ventured off to take some pictures and eventually met up with Tex and his girlfriend Porsche.

From there we grabbed a taxi and went to dinner. After dinner we went out bar hopping. Tex being the local that he is took us to a few of his favorite watering holes including a few bars that he played at with his old band The Roughnecks. Aki and Porsche got along famously and a good time was had by all.

Check out the my Flickr page for more images from today. More tomorrow.

FourSquare is a new service for smartphone users from the creators of Dodgeball, a startup purchased and then shelved by Google. FourSquare utilizes your phone’s GPS to “Check in” to different places you go, see where your friends are and allows you to “Shout” status updates to your friends. On the surface it seems similar to other “location status” services such as Brightkite or Loopt. However FourSquare goes a different route than it’s competitors, it emphasizes the social potential of location status by turning it into a game.

I was, at one point a big promoter of Brightkite. While there are functions of the service I did like, I’ve started to question more and more why I used it. I started to qeustion: “Who cares that I’ve checked in to my apartment?” “Do I really want people knowing where my apartment is?” If I am going to restrict visibility of my location – why am I even using this service to begin with?” The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a really useful way for someone to stalk me and not much more.

FourSquare takes a different approach, it focuses on bars, clubs and restaurants rather than just arbitrary check ins to every location. It’s intention is to connect you and your friends in a nightlife setting.

Although I’ve been using it since SXSW it wasn’t until this weekend, on a trip visiting NYC, that I really saw the potential of FourSquare. The service awards your “check ins” a variety of ways. For each check in you earn points, and you get bonus points for doing things like hitting multiple locations in one night. You can also unlock badges, (yes, like in Boy / Girl Scouts) for accomplishing an objective, similar to many video games. Lastly, by checking into a location on multiple occasions you can become it’s “Mayor” if you’re there more often then someone else. Each city has it’s own set of badges and Mayors (There are currently 12 supported US cities.)

My FourSquare activity tells an amusing story about my trip to NY. According to Foursquare: I got “Crunked” on Thursday night bar hopping through Brooklyn, earned extra points meeting up with my friend Tom (who saw where I was via FourSquare and proposed we meet up) and went on a 4 day “Bender” which culminated in me becoming the “Mayor” of the Coyote Ugly Saloon Saturday night. Hopefully you can see why I’m enjoying this.

Something I’m really enjoying is the ability to build to-do lists of things / places you want to hit and view local to-dos that other users have posted. This allows for someone to craft their own adventures and come up with creative experiences. There is also a weekly leader board that lets you see who in your area is really partying it up and where you rank.

The end result is a service that feels like a giant mobile web scavenger hunt that encourages users to challenge each-other and compete.

The service is not without flaws though: Many bars and restaurants don’t show up in the listings, the there are many quirks to the website and application itself. IT’s creators have acknowledged that he service is still very much in development and honestly, it sometimes feels like a very public beta. They’ve reportedly set themselves a June 1st deadline to iron out the kinks and get it working the way they want. Even taking all that into consideration, the service is very functional and ver impressive.

Some things I’d like to see in future revisions:

• More visibility to user profiles and todo lists: I’d really like to discover new people to connect to, right now there are few days to do this. I wish profiles listed a clearer stream of what I did, when I did it and what rewards my actions earned me.  In 6 months I’d like to know which 4 bars I went to to unlock the “Crunked” badge.
• Less walls between cities. It’s strange that on the website I need to switch a drop down to see different sets of information for different cities. I’d like the ability to see everything at once and also see my local updates. The walls are weird. They discourage people from being friends cross-city. My friend Frank has an account but I’ll likely never see what he’s up to unless I switch my location to where he is. Sure local users should be prioritized, but just because I can’t get to Washington to meet up with Frank tonight doesn’t mean I don’t care.
• Badges also suffer due to these walls. I like the idea of having different goals in different cities but it seems silly that I’ve now earned the “Newbie” badge a few times and that I have to go our 4 nights in a row again to earn the “Bender” badge in Chicago because the one I earned was in NY. Perhaps there should be global badges and specialized local badges?

These are just my .02 cents. I’m excited to continue using FourSquare and to see where the service goes in the future, it’s genuinely a lot of fun. I recommend checking it out via their website: playfoursquare.com. There is an iPhone application available via the App Store and a mobile browser optimized version of the site available for Android and Blackberry users for now.