The chief executive of Intel Germany has revealed that Apple is developing a touchscreen device similar to an iPhone, but larger, and with a bigger touchscreen.

Hannes Schwaderer made the statement at an event held in Munich, Germany that this alleged tablet-device-phone-pda-something will be using his company’s new Atom processor for mobile devices. This supports rumors circulating the net that Apple is indeed developing a tablet gadget for general computing that may or not be a new iPhone model. Whether this announcement is based on fact or on one too many brewskis is yet to be determined.

Can you say Newton 2.0?

(Via Electronista)

Two pieces of great news for my country, the Philippines! One is, I’m back, and the other more important one is that Engadget reports that Globe Telecom is releasing the iPhone in the Philippines!

Well, apparently not all credit goes to Globe. According to Engadget’s EIC Ryan Block, it’s actually Singapore Telecommunications which secured the rights, and is releasing it through it’s partly-owned subsidiary Globe.

According to Engadget:

Singapore Telecommunications (aka SingTel) announced that it’s secured agreements to distribute the iPhone in Singapore (on SingTel Mobile) and its partly-owned subsidiaries in Australia (on Optus), India (on Bharti Group), and the Philippines (on Globe Telecom). Vodafone’s also distributing the iPhone in India and Australia though, so we’ll have to wait until later this year to find out who gets to shoot first.”

No news as to when though, nor any other details yet, but knowing it’ll actually happen is the important thing. I’m hoping it’ll be announced at the WWDC next month.

(Thanks to Jason for the heads-up!)

UPDATE: Globe Telecom has made the announcement (tersely though; Engadget had more to say) on its website. Question now is, what’s longtime rival Smart going to do? I don’t think they’ll take this sitting down.

All signs point to a worldwide rollout of the next iteration of the iPhone sometime soon, unlike the previous spotty and country-specific launches since the product was introduced last year.

For instance, the latest releases of iPhone Software 2.0 have included handwriting recognition for Traditional and Simplified Chinese, where drawing a character on the screen with your finger will get you prompts for four possible characters on the side of the screen.

Plans have also emerged for the release of the new iPhone in Japan, Russia, Mexico and Latin America, while Vodafone has confirmed it has won rights to distribute the iPhone in India, Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey. T-Mobile will also release it in Austria and Italy.

No word on the Philippines yet, but hope springs eternal.

(Pic care of Ubergizmo)

If you’re the type who really needs to do everything you can to your gear, here’s something you can do to your jailbroken iPhone - add video wallpaper.

A group of developers called Skrew created an app called vWallpaper, or Video Wallpaper for the the iPhone, which changes your regular pic into a running video. (Hope the developer’s name is all it is - this being an Alpha version, we don’t really know what it could do to your iPhone, so be warned). There are almost a couple of dozen of video wallpapers you can download from within the app.

All you need do is add http://repo.sc/jtizzle to your Installer source list and then check out vWallpaper from the Install/Recent Packages tab. If it’s not there look under the Multimedia category under Install.

Video (complete with totally inappropriate music) of how it looks over here.

Rumors are rolling in about the next gen iPhone!

Engadget’s Ryan Block’s trusted source’s test unit (whew!) is alledgedly slightly thicker than the original, but retains almost everything else - size, shape, screen resolution, non-user-replaceable battery, save for a few marked differences: an all glossy non-metal black back, chrome volume buttons, a regular, unrecessed earphone port (thank God), and the much-awaited 3G and GPS features.

Also, no word on storage capacity (anyone for 32gb?) or battery life. Power is a major concern because of the newly introduced 3G and GPS and how those’d affect power consumption (which was the reason they were left out in the first place). Might make the Mophie Juice Pack (which we mentioned in a previous post) a bigger deal - if the new unit would be compatible with it, that is.

Of course, as Ryan says, no one can tell with Apple if this’ll be the one that’ll come out this year (as early as July, they say). For all we know, knowing Steve Jobs, this might well be a red herring he’s throwing out to get us off track. It could be totally different. Abangan!