Reuters news agency reported today that Apple will not meet their initial goal of shipping the iPhone 5 by June.

Rather, production on the iPhone 5 will begin in July or August, with the first set of customers expected to receive their new iPhone 5 sometime in September.

Reuters reported that their sources “with direct knowledge of [Apple's] supply chain,” said the iPhone 5 will look similar in design to the iPhone 4, and will be fitted with a faster processor, perhaps the “A5,” which is currently used in the iPad 2.

As of the date of this post, there was no comment from Apple regarding the Reuters report.

But Reuters is one of the world’s most respected, long-running news wire agencies, and have a strong track record of leaking reports about Apple products in the past.

While the news agency is unlikely to reveal the identities of their sources, Reuters provided additional credible information, including which companies would be manufacturing which parts of the iPhone 5. For example, Wintek will supply the touchscreen panel, Largan Precision will produce the camera module, and Foxconn will manufacture the phone’s casing.

Not only has there been no reaction from Apple, the company’s website doesn’t have any apparent announcements or product information regarding the iPhone 5, and a search of apple.com did not result in any link to a page about the iPhone 5.

Additionally, the Reuters report makes even more sense when compared to a Mac Life article from April 11th in which tech writer Brian Hogg says that Apple’s component suppliers in Asia have yet to receive a production roadmap, which usually comes out months in advance in order to give suppliers time to manufacture the components.

The fact that this hasn’t happened yet,” Hogg writes, “flies in the face of rumors that the iPhone 5 would be released this summer.” Hogg even speculated that the iPhone 5 may not come out until 2012, but that contradicts, even as he concedes, the fact that iPhone needs to keep up its pace of an annual version update, especially at a time it is facing more competition than ever before.

Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer suggested to the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg that manufacturing was being held up due to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Stringer also seemed to hint that Sony was manufacturing an 8 mega-pixel camera for the iPhone 5.

However, other reports have debunked that possibility, insisting that Omnivision will remain the iPhone’s built-in camera supplier with some rumors saying the new camera for the iPhone 5 will be a 12MP camera with 1080p and 60fps video recording.

Others have speculated that Apple has decided to hold off on the iPhone 5 release so that it can finish developing its new cloud service that will be serve a big role in the new iOS 5. The service will reportedly allow Apple users to store more of their data and media to the cloud which will be streamable, and accessible, to all of the user’s Apple devices – like the iPhone, iPad and iPod.

The current generation iPhone 4 shipped on June 24, 2010, which will make it well over a year since the last version of the iPhone became available. Apple previously released new versions of the iPhone approximately one year after the previous, but this year will push the iPhone’s launch into the time of year Apple typically releases new laptops and iPods.

One of the biggest discussions online regarding the iPhone 5 right now is within the comments section of a Hubpages.com post written by whoever CiaoKatherine is (we’ll call her Katherine). In her post, Katherine claims to have dug up her own inside scoops on what to expect from the iPhone 5, including her reporting that the latest version of the hugely successful cellphone will contain a dual processor (the A5?) and run on the enhanced 4G network.

She also claims to have learned that the iPhone 5 will contain “powerful graphics chip cards”
and “up to 14 hours of talk time on the 3G and 7 hours on the 4G.” The assumption there is that the faster network will consume twice as much battery life.

As noted above, the comments section for this post is extremely active. While the majority of comments we reviewed where enthusiastic iPhone fans spouting accolades (before its release, mind you), others who felt just the opposite, some who made the point of waiting for the iPhone 5S, and another group who said they’ll wait for the iPhone 6.

By the way, did you know that you’re iPhone tracks your movements and sells that data to advertisers. There are two potential ways to fight back against that. One is to go to http://oo.apple.com on devices running Apple iOS 4, and opt out. The best way is to turn it off when not using it, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having a cellphone, and they know it.