Reports Say Apple Is Coming Out With An iPhone ‘5SE,’ New Phone Will Combine Features From The iPhone 5 And 6S

Apple is all about giving customers variety, and if the reports are to be believed, the iPhone 5SE will do just that. Apple is supposedly working on a new phone that will combine the elements of the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6S for a product unlike anything Apple has brought to the table before.

The company has been suffering from a reputation for not doing anything innovative with their tech, so this new iPhone may help that image if it’s really in the works. 9 to 5 mac discovered that the new iPhone 5SE will come with a barrage of cool features, including a powerful 8-megapixel rear camera and the ability to use “Live Photos” like the iPhone 6 can.

“Live Photos” is a particularly magical feature that looks like it’s straight out of Harry Potter. This feature works by recording video when you open the photos app, so that by the time you take a picture, you’ll see a moving photo with sound. It’s about as sweet as it sounds.

The 5SE will also have the same NFC chip that powers Apple Pay on the iPhone 5S and 6. While many people expected Apple’s next move to be the iPhone 7, sometimes doing what is unexpected is a better method of wowing customers. Presumably, the iPhone 5SE will be running on Apple’s newest OS, iOS 9, which in and of itself promises some interesting new features.

Some of these new features include the News app, which puts all the news stories you’re reading in a single place. Additionally, there are new Siri commands that allow you to, for instance, ask Siri to remind you about an email when you’re in that email. It’s probably safe to say we will see these and other iOS 9-specific features on the new iPhone 5SE.

Reports about the iPhone 5SE suggest it will have a super small screen size, about 4 inches, which might be ideal for people who find larger models harder to use or take a call on. In the past, Apple has offered differently-sized screens, but it seems the iPhone 5SE has only one screen option at this point.

There’s no word yet on the price of the iPhone 5SE, but if it follows its predecessors, it could cost up to $700 U.S. retail. Apple is currently offering a program that allows users to trade in old iPhones for a new one, but we can only guess whether this will apply to the iPhone 5SE when it comes out in March 2016.

Another feature the iPhone 5SE may have is multi-tasking. This handy little function lets you open two screens at once in a split-screen view so that you can grab information from one and pop it into the other screen. This can be useful for a lot of things, such as copying an email address then pasting it into your e-mail client of choice, or dropping an address directly into a map application. While not a new feature for the iPhone 5SE, it does change the way iOS looks and could be a useful tool (as well as looking nice on screen!).

What do you think about the idea of an iPhone that combines the best features of the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6? Will you be standing in line to order one, or will you wait til the next standard edition comes out later this year?

[Image Via Ymgerman/Shutterstock]