Stories by John Cox

One of the iOSphere's enduring myths is that one or another component or production screwup has repeatedly delayed most iPhones, including the iPhone 5S or 6 or whatever.

The hot air levels rose dramatically in the iOSphere this week on the strength of one laconic, six-paragraph posting about the expected weight of iPad 5.

If you've ever dropped, broken or drowned your mobile phone, Kyocera Wireless has a deal for you: two new waterproofed Android phones, one of them ruggedized, aimed at first-time smartphone buyers looking for affordable handsets. The products were announced for the U.S market at this week's CTIA cellular industry conference in Las Vegas.

Aruba Networks became the latest company to announce Wi-Fi access points that can support over 1Gbps throughput, at the cellular industry's CTIA show in Las Vegas this week.

There's nothing like exclusive, high resolution, leaked photographs of arcane internal iPhone components to trigger the gaga reflex in the iOSphere. It takes skill, honed by long experience with rumoring, to read into them far, far more than is actually there.

Even before summer, the iOSphere languishes in the iPad rumor doldrums, apparently having exhausted itself with hopes for a Retina display iPad mini 2, and the A7 chip for the iPad 5. But there is hope: The Rollup uncovered the radical iPadiGlasses, in an exclusive report.

Google on Wednesday demanded that Microsoft yank its YouTube app for Windows Phone from the market and disable any downloaded copies of the app, according to Wired.com, which received a copy of Google's cease and desist letter.

It took two hours for three BlackBerry executives to announce four items: a routine software update, a new low-end qwerty smartphone aimed at overseas markets, a new feature for BlackBerry Messenger, and Messenger's extension to iOS and Android.

An unstable hot air mass troubled the iOSphere this week, the sky blackened by contradictory rumours, sometimes in the same blog post.

The iOSphere seems to have lowered itself from mere rumor to mere guesses for iPad 5 and the iPad mini 2, though with just as much assurance.

Almost overnight, thanks to posts finally resembling "news," the iOSphere has become an expert in industrial design, contemplating an iPhone 6 or 5S or something with a flatter, sleeker, cooler, starker, smoother, de-glitzed and overall just better-looking iOS 7.

Work on the next major release of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 7, seems to be speeding up, as the company shifts engineering resources and adjusts deadlines to meet two milestones: a preview at June's annual developer conference, and a release in September.

The truth is out there, in blurry, "leaked" photos of the iPad 5 rear shell, which is just the right size for the compost pile of iOSphere rumors. One thing seems certain: iPad 5 will be rectangular.

BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins mentioned in a Bloomberg interview Tuesday that he thought that "In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore." He was quickly denounced for ignoring the iPad, not owning up to the failure of BlackBerry's own PlayBook tablet, and in general for "trashtalking" tablets and "being hopelessly out of touch."

The iPlasticPhone rears its glossy head and the iOSphere shivers.