The hot rumor on the ‘nets right now has release 1.1.3 of the iPhone’s operating system pegged for this Saturday, bringing with it a pair of moderately hot features: voice notes and disk mode. Of course, we already have these sorts of goodies available to us through the magic of third-party development, but it’s always nice to get ‘em straight from Cupertino so developers can turn their collective attention to more pressing matters. Since Apple’s unspoken policy here is something to the effect of “new firmware versions don’t exist until we announce them, we won’t announce them until they’re available, and we’ll make them available when we’re good and ready,” we’ll believe it when we open iTunes and get the upgrade notification — good to have something to look forward to, though, hm?

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The Gadget: The Cowon Q5W PMP that has a feature list as long as my leg, which (and this is abbreviated) supports a bunch of video formats such as DivX and XviD, along with various nerd-friendly audio formats like OGG and FLAC. It’s also got an optional GPS mount as well, in addition to 60GB of storage and a 720×480 display.

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In an already interesting article chronicling the last 10 months of the second coming of Michael Dell at his namesake, Forbes mentions two more interesting upcoming products: A suicide chip for stolen laptops that remotely nukes the hard drive, and a smartphone co-produced with Quanta that has “video, an MP3 player and Internet access and [will] be unleashed on the world early next year.” It’s a little off the initial release projection–nowish–but Forbes’ tidbit indicates the rumored project’s still alive and in the oven. Obviously, it remains mostly a blank slate of speculation–what’s the OS going to be? Still WinMo6 or will Dell mix it up? Will it have a touchscreen, QWERTY or both? The list goes on. One thing’s for sure, it’ll be a certifiable test of the new design chops Michael Dell’s been pushing so hard, which we hope are up to the task since there’s nothing worse than a poorly designed smartphone. What do you think should go into a Dell smartphone?

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