As you are well aware by know, we’ve received an updated iPhone 4 and not an all new iPhone 5? A newly designed iPhone 5 is what many people had been expecting to be launched earlier this month, and an upgraded iPhone 4 came as a bit of a disappointment to many. Well there are possibly a number of reasons why Apple have not launched the iPhone 5 as expected.

The recent death of Steve Jobs and his increasingly poor health over the last several months are probably some of the biggest factors in this. Steve Jobs has left a hole in Apple’s leadership with people having to move from department to department to try and fill the gaps. This plugging will have distracted Apple and seen its resources in a number of areas lack. This would have caused an issue with the iPhone’s production obviously and left us without the iPhone 5.

Apple may also be suffering problems with its main components supplier Samsung. This could be caused by the number of patent infringements and the legal actions that have been taken both ways. Samsung has been accused by Apple of copying some of its technology, and Apple would not want to provide Samsung with access to new technology if such an allegation is true.

Recently Apple has been trying to secure its components from other manufacturers in Asia, and it is likely that any new revolutionary technology that Apple has in the pipeline they would not want to hand over to Samsung to build. Apple will wait until it has secured new suppliers before it starts constructing a new design, with the supply chain being spread across many smaller companies rather than from one large tech giant like Samsung – who have the power to really compete against Apple in the smartphone industry.

Many commentators have repeated during this time of waiting that Apple doesn’t make new devices and merely makes existing technology pretty and markets it. So, perhaps Apple is merely stuck at a lose end and just doesn’t have any new ideas and no new technology to offer. This would mean calling something with a new skin and the current iPhone 4S components an iPhone 5 a little bit premature.

Finally perhaps that is just the way things are with Apple and the way they were always planned. Perhaps we just lost our sights and got a little ahead of ourselves and began projecting new items that Apple never had in line for release. This would make sense to an extent as thing of what came after the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 3GS. The 3G and 3GS were both built around the same design as the original iPhone. So if Apple managed to stretch one phone design over 3 years, what made people think they would ditch the iPhone 4 design after just 12 months?

There is one thing that people are missing though. Even though the iPhone 4S contract may not have a new casing or a larger screen, it is certainly more of an upgrade than the 3G or 3GS were from the original iPhone. All that was changed there was the addition of 3G support.

The iPhone 4S not only increases the processing power to double that of the iPhone 4, but the graphical processing power is now 7 times more powerful making this the most excellent smartphone for mobile gaming. Plenty of new features have been added to iOS 5, over 200 an all, many offering dramatic improvement to areas of phone use that actually matter to people. For example, messaging and social networking have now had a big revamp with Twitter integration, iMessage and Find my Friends.

These features are now available for earlier iPhone models too thanks to an iOS upgrade that many people were quick to make use of. One feature that is unique to the iPhone 4S though is Siri. Sure Siri may not seem like much, but it could be as revolutionary a feature as touch sensitive screens were just a few years ago – and a huge difference to the Siri-less iPhone 4 deals.