Of all the rumors flying around the great profit Steve coming down from Mount Cupertino with the tablets this Wednesday. This one actually caught me off guard.
Mashable is reporting that the iPhone’s exclusivity with AT&T might end as soon as this Wednesday.
Really? Ok, we all knew that the exclusivity agreement with AT&T would end sometime. And it’s true that even the Justice is looking into this whole phone carrier exclusivity thing. But here is the thing, not all the carriers in the US use the same technology.
Verizon and Sprint currently use CDMA based 3G technology. ATT uses standard GSM, and T-Mobile uses GSM but on a different frequency from the rest of the world. So essentially you have three technologies spread over four carriers.
The GSM that AT&T uses is the world standard, so it makes sense that if Apple were to make just one iPhone that would be the one to use, and that’s what they have done. So what is really being suggested here in this rumor is that Apple would make a second type of iPhone with a different frequency for use on T-Mobile (possible) or make a separate phone with a CDMA chipset that could be used on Verizon or Sprint (unlikely).
But there is a third option here. Verizon has committed along with AT&T to roll out LTE as it’s 4G technology. It’s supposed to be hitting major markets as early as second half of 2010. So… if this tablet announcement includes the announcement of iPhone 4.0 being released in June (possible) then it could be a LTE capable iPhone that has the ability to fall back to CDMA or GSM where LTE is not available. This would involve some dual mode chipsets but qualcomm has been making such a chipset for a while now. So perhaps we could see an “announcement” of the end of exclusivity on Wednesday.
But that’s hardly ending exclusivity on Wednesday…. But then, rumors, exaggeration and hype all go hand in hand, especially where the all mighty Apple is involved.
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