By the time you read this, Steve Jobs may have already unveiled the iPhone 5, rendering our hard work here of mostly academic interest. Oh well. Here’s our iPhone 5 wish list, and how likely we figure each feature will be.

Apple’s design ethos is all about unity, so many expect the iPhone 5 to follow the steps of the iPad 2 and MacBook Air by slimming way down, Sources suggest a return to aluminum for the chassis, with the troublesome antenna moving to the Apple logo, where signal¬blocking fingers can’t intrude.

The iPhone 4′s 3.5in touchscreen is starting to look tetchy compared to Samsung and HTC’s 4in-plus monsters, so Apple might boost the iPhone 5′s screen to match, The Retina Display already offers the highest resolution out there ¬don’t expect it to get any sharper.

There are already accessories that add NFC skills to the iPhone, but some tech speculators reckon it could come built into the next one, If so, it’d turn your phone into an ‘e-wallet’, allowing you to pay for crisps and cans of Pepsi with no more than a swipe over a shop’s pay point. Could NFC be the iPhone 5′s ‘one more thing’?

Dual-core is becoming the smartphone norm, so a processor upgrade for the iPhone looks like a shoo-in, To cope with improved multitasking capabilities coming in iOS 5, logic suggests it’ll get the same AS engine that’s found in the iPad, That should keep the Samsung Galaxy S lis of the world at bay – for now.

Apple isn’t exactly known for going megapixel mad on the iPhone’s camera, so a Xenon¬packing 12MP monster looks unlikely, Still, the 5MP snapper on the iPhone 4 is looking long in the tooth, and a bump up to 8MP would be welcome, especially given iOS5′s new camera skills such as red-eye reduction.

With gestures at the core of OS X Lion and multi-finger navigation appearing in developer versions of the iPad’s operating system, the iPhone 5 could be the first to ditch the home button, A bigger screen size would make four-and five-finger gestures possible, bringing up the toolbar without having to press a button.