Evidence Points to Thinner iPhone & iPod Touch Models

There is increasing evidence to suggest that Apple will be releasing thinner iPhone and iPod touch models sometime in the near future, although it’s unlikely to be the “iPhone 4S” update that is expected in September.

Thinner Camera Means Thinner iPod Touch?
The first piece of evidence comes via MacRumors, who tells us that Apple’s preferred camera sensor supplier, OmniVision Technologies, has just released a new 5MP camera lens that is 20% thinner than existing versions. With rumors saying that the next iPhone will have an 8MP camera, this new OmniVision camera seems a better fit for an iPod touch since “Apple has had to sacrifice on the camera quality and resort to thinner, lower-resolution sensors on those models,” according to MacRumors.

Tiny SIM Card Suggests Thinner & Smaller iPhones… But We Still Have SIM Cards
Next up is news from Reuters that “Apple has proposed a standardized SIM card smaller than those it currently uses in the iPhone and iPad in order to be able to produce thinner devices.” This is certainly good news for a thinner and small iPhone, but, as MacGasm points out, bad news for the universal SIM or SIM-free iPhones that were conceptualized and even patented. The idea behind a SIM-free phone allowed users to let cell carriers bid for their business and thus reduce rates for consumers, but MacGasm suggests rightly so that this idea probably didn’t go over so well with cellular carriers. In this case, the consolation prize for the consumer is likely a future smaller phone.

2+2 = Smaller and Thinner iOS Hardware
Combining these two pieces of news with various reports from earlier in the year looks to confirm Apple’s continued effort to minimize the iOS hardware footprint. In February, Bloomberg reported that Apple was working on a smaller iPhone, that report that was later substantiated by the Wall Street Journal only to be contradicted by another from the NYT. Now that smaller hardware components are turning up, it doesn’t take much to put 2 and 2 together, and that gives a decent chance we’ll at least see a redesigned, and maybe even smaller, iPod touch in September.