Once of the most hotly anticipated announcements expected tomorrow at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is the next major release of their mobile operating system iOS 6. While we are still almost 24 hours away from the start of the event, we’ve received news of a potential beta release of iOS 6 that will be released right after the keynote tomorrow. Check out the details after the jump!
The news comes from MacRumors – a blog covering, you guessed it, Apple-related rumors – in the form of a blog-post in which they discuss the news sourced from Chinese forum WeiPhone. A post on said forum has a list of links to beta builds of iOS 6 and Safari 6. These links actually aren’t working as expected, but they due lead to a page on Apple’s official Developer website with the message Your session has expired. Changing the URL leads to a Access denied message which suggests that these links – however invalid – may have some weight to them.
So we have a list of non-working links, now what?
Well, these links do present an interesting piece of information: with iOS 6 – as with any other major new iOS release – Apple will drop support for last oldest generation of iOS devices. With iOS 4.3.x, support for iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G was dropped and now, with iOS 6, the original iPad and iPod touch 3G will not be supported.
The main reason for dropping support is because of the lack of horsepower that these devices have; this was understandable with iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G which had rather low-end processors, but this time they are dropping support for the original iPad as well as iPod touch 3G which has specs similar to the iPhone 3GS. Both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 will be supported with iOS 6, probably because some models are still on sale at Apple retail stores.
Supported devices include: iPhone 4S, iPad 2, iPad (3rd generation), iPhone 4, iPod touch 4G, and iPhone 3GS.
Before you get all riled up, we must understand that this is not the official list. Apple may just end up supporting the original iPad and iPod touch 3G.
WWDC 2012 starts tomorrow and we will be covering it here at Redmond Pie, so stay tuned!
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