What the iOS 6 Reveals about the iPhone 5

Apple's new mobile operating interface, the iOS 6, will be coming out this fall. Rumors have the iPhone 5 coming out at around the same date - either in late September, or sometime in October. There is almost no doubt that the next-gen iPhone will utilize Apple's latest iOS, so here's a look at some of the features in the upcoming iOS 6 that could hint at what the iPhone 5 will have in store for us.

Passbook

Apple description of Passbook reads: "Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon."

An app like this is essentially like a wallet (minus the cash), and looks to integrate payment systems more into Apple's iOS. This could mean that the iPhone 5 will come with an NFC chip, which would allow for data to be transmitted wirelessly as easily as simply bumping NFC-enabled devices together. An NFC chip would mean iPhone 5 users could download movie times from a 'smart' movie poster and carry out interactions with other NFC-enabled phones. Sharing contacts, information, or even media would be even easier.

Auto Layout

When developers received the SDK for the iOS 6, they noticed a feature called Auto Layout. This allows developers to set parameters for an app's UI that allows them the app to display properly across a variety of platforms. This could mean a larger screen size for the iPhone 5, since now developers can properly scale their apps to fit the new, rumored 4-inch screen and still have it work on existing iPhones.

5 App Icon Rows

Website 9to5Mac reported that when they changed the resolution of their iOS simulator to 640X1136 (the expected resolution of a 4-inch screen), iOS 6 displayed five rows of icons instead of the usual four. When they tried the same thing in iOS 5, the interface only displayed four, stretched rows. The main point? That only the new iPhone will be taller, and all other iPhones will run the current 640X960 resolution, where only four rows will fit.

Smaller Dock Connector

Apple's next iPhone is also expected to help debut the smaller dock connector that Apple is rumored to be working on. Some sites claim a 19-pin dock connector, while others go as low as eight pins. Website 9to5Mac has once again done some sleuthing and found a mysterious reference to a hardware feature called "9pin" in their iOS 6 beta builds. This could be a veiled indication that the dock will be nine pins.