Apple set to introduce new iPhone version on Oct 4

Apple Inc will introduce a new version of the iPhone at an October 4 event, the first upgrade of its best-selling product since Steve Jobs resigned as chief executive officer.

“Let’s talk iPhone,” Apple said in an invitation to the gathering at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The new iPhone would include a better camera and a faster processor, people familiar with the matter said earlier this year. Introduced in 2007, the iPhone accounts for about half of Apple’s revenue. Demand for the touch-screen gadget has helped catapult Apple ahead of Exxon Mobil Corp as the world’s most valuable company.

Jobs, who resigned as chief executive and turned the leadership of the company over to Tim Cook on August 24, is now Apple’s chairman. “The iPhone is the most important product line in the company,” said Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. “Cook will be heavily watched,” because he didn’t typically participate in major product introductions in his former role, Wu said.

Apple showed off new features of the iPhone’s revamped operating system during Jobs’s last major Apple event, a developers conference in June. The new software, called iOS 5, includes new notification and text messaging systems. The company also said in June it would debut iCloud, which lets users to wirelessly access music, pictures and other files across different Apple devices.

Biggest Product
The new iPhone could be Apple’s best-selling product yet. Apple may sell 110 million iPhones in 2012, a faster pace than this year, when nearly 40 million were sold during the first half of the calendar year, according to Mike Abramsky, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in Toronto.

Pent-up demand may help sales, said Maynard Um, an analyst at UBS Securities LLC. Apple is unveiling a new model 16 months after the iPhone 4 debuted, compared with the 12 months between previous model updates.