Apple this weekend has tipped its hand early and provided clues as to its future iPhone upgrades. Pandav, the developer of the iPhone train tracker app iBART, reports seeing the previously leaked iPhone 3,1 hardware ID showing up in logs identifying those using the software. The previously unreleased device has been seen as early as the March beta of iPhone OS 3.0 but now appears to be in live testing online, keeping in step with Apple's past practices of testing iPhones' Internet usage several months ahead of release.
The company typically uses a numbering scheme of this sort that represents the major and minor hardware revisions of a given device; the iPhone 3GS was identified late last year as iPhone 2,1 and suggests that the 2010 model will be more than a minor update.
Simultaneously, Apple has put up a job posting for an iPhone Software Engineer specifically looking to upgrade the interface and underlying code for the Maps software built into the firmware. It doesn't provide clues as to specific features but is clear it wants changes that "rethink how users use Maps" with new features. While not necessarily significant by itself, it comes not long after Apple acquired Placebase, whose expertise in map overlays is being brought to a mapping team likely to be working on iPhone updates. The fruits of this development may not necessarily be noticed with any new iPhones released next year, however.
Source: electronista
