Bloomberg reported that the iPad 3 entered production and is tracking a March launch. The report also claimed the new iPad will feature a higher-resolution display, Retina probably, and a quad-core processor. It will also connect to LTE networks.
The company’s manufacturing partners in Asia started ramping up production of the iPad 3 this month and plan to reach full volumes by February, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The tablet will use a quad-core chip, an enhancement that lets users jump more quickly between applications, two of the people said.
The iPad 3 was previously reported to sport a similar design to the iPad 2. We also previously discovered references to quad-core iOS devices in the latest iOS betas.
Update: Reports that T-Mobile knows Apple’s chipset roadmap are false I’ve confirmed with T-Mobile’s PR department. Ray only said that Apple could choose to use Chips that are AWS compatible, which is obvious.
I had a few minutes this evening between Colbie Cailat songs at T-Mobile’s CES 2012 party to talk to CTO Neville Ray on what the future holds for T-Mobile since the AT&T merger is off. T-Mobile walked away with not only $3 billion but also some AWS spectrum from AT&T.
First, Ray is excited. He talked like someone who has been imprisoned by the merger over the past year, unable to make any long term moves. T-Mobile is still evaluating its long-term options (like LTE) but there is a buzz in the air now. While the parent company Deutsch Telekom gets the $3 billion payoff from AT&T, it seems that there will be big investment over the next few years in the T-Mobile USA subsidy.
On Dec. 19, T-Mobile’s official AT&T breakup release stated what —besides the $3 billion— T-Mobile would get:
As part of the break-up fee, T-Mobile USA will receive a large package of AWS mobile spectrum in 128 Cellular Market Areas (CMAs), including 12 of the top 20 markets (Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Baltimore and Seattle).
The UMTS roaming agreement for the U.S. in T-Mobile USA’s favor has a term of over seven years and will allow the company to improve its footprint significantly among the U.S. population and offer its customers better broadband coverage for mobile communications services in the future. Population coverage will increase from 230 million potential customers at present to 280 million. As a result of the agreement with AT&T, coverage will be extended to many regions of the U.S. in which T-Mobile USA previously had neither its own high-speed mobile communications network nor the associated roaming agreements.
That spectrum will allow T-Mobile to light up HSPA+ radio frequency used by the iPhone’s 3G.
Nevada, parts of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are also seeing some pockets of 1900MHz spectrum refarming for HSPA+. There are other parts of the country T-Mobile can refarm the 1900MHz spectrum but, the focus is on the Pacific Northwest, Nevada, Utah and California for right now from what we’re told. We should emphasize and emphasize greatly that this post does not mean that all of the aforementioned areas are seeing this refarmed spectrum, just pockets inside those areas.
Ray said those networks were not officially lit up (perhaps some tower testing or AT&T roaming confusion happened).
Nevertheless, there is good news for those who want to use an iPhone on T-Mobile’s 3G network…
China Mobile doesn’t officially offer the iPhone yet. But it is carrying 10 Million iPhones on its network according to Reuters.
“We have not yet got agreement with Apple,” Wang said on the fringes of the ITU World telecoms fair in Geneva. “Apple promised to provide, when they develop the iPhone for LTE, that it will include TD-LTE. We are discussing the details.”
There had been rumors that Apple would offer a TL-LTE version of the iPhone 4S earlier this year with China Mobile going as far as saying:
China Mobile and Apple hope to find a solution for close collaboration. We discussed this issue with Apple. We hope Apple will produce a new iPhone with TD-LTE. We have already got a positive answer from Apple.
It appears that positive answer wasn’t for this round of devices, though the CDMA Verizon iPhone arrived off schedule in January. TD-LTE will require some separate chips which could be hard to fit inside the iPhone 4S’s enclosure. Apple however has to look longingly at that 600 million+ subscriber base, however.
While T-Mobile USA is on the opposite end of the subscriber spectrum (China Mobile has around the same amount of subscribers as the populations of Europe and the US combined), T-Mobile is the #4 carrier in the US in the midst of AT&T attempting to swallow it.
But they both don’t officially offer the iPhone, yet have a significant number of iPhones floating around on their network. Both offer a different type of high speed 4G network that stock iPhone 4Ses can’t take advantage of. Both networks do offer EDGE/GSM speeds however which some may find valuable tied with reduced fees or better coverage. T-Mobile told us earlier this year that they had over a million iPhones on their network, a figure that is likely to go up with Apple sneakily offering iPhones 4S unlocked at launch.
Tommy Ljunggren is senior vice president of Swedish wireless operator TeliaSonera and he’s got some “nice” words about mobile prospects of his valued partner, Apple. Ljunggren told Telecoms.com that Apple is no longer as relevant a factor in mobile as it used to be, saying the company is set for failure unless the next iPhone adopts chips that support fourth-generation cellular networks based on Long Term Evolution radio technology, being deployed by carriers around the world:
If you asked me two years ago I would have said Apple would be very important. But now it will be a bad mistake not to include LTE in the iPhone 5 as otherwise they will really be run over by the others. Apple are not unique enough and there is disappointment over the 4S – it was too small step for them.
He then slammed Apple over LTE, admitting that the current batch of 4G LTE chips consume too much power:
I don’t think Apple will decide if LTE will fly or not. My expectation is that in 2013/14 we will really see low-end smartphones having LTE as well. The big question is what frequency bands they will put in for smartphones. They will be true LTE smartphones – not the ones that the US has right now with two radios. These drain the batteries flat very quickly as they have one LTE terminal for data and a CDMA voice terminal. It’s basically a dongle and phone that they glue together. They work – just not for long.
Interestingly, this is the very reason Apple CEO Tim Cook dismissed a 4G LTE iPhone. Ljunggren, of course, is confused and here’s why.
The keynote went a little bad over in Hong Kong with both the Facial Recognition and the Quick Response features not working or crashing the device. Overall though, there are some interesting new features that certainly differentiate Android from iOS and Windows Phone 7.
As for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus Phone, it has a 5-megapixel camera which has to be a letdown when compared to 8 megapixel cameras that are standardizing on the high end across the industry. Its most impressive feature (unless you are trying to squeeze it into your pocket) has to be the 4.65-inch 720P display. Although Pentile, which means not every pixel gets RGB dots, it does get close to Apple’s 326 PPI Retina display with a 316 PPI density. Like the as yet unpopular Honeycomb tablets, it doesn’t have any front facing buttons but has screen buttons that shift around as well as all of those new Android 4.0 features.
Reddit user TheReverndZ shows the text he just got from AT&T. He was over 11GB (!!) today for the month which is pretty hefty to say the least. Next month, he’s probably going to get throttled as per the news we broke in June.
Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period.
Don’t laugh Verizon users. Yours is coming too. Sprint, for the record, says it won’t throttle guys like Skelatwork, if they get the iphone Expand Expanding Close
According to a poorly translated report from Macotakara, China Unicom’s Deputy Director of Research has confirmed an iPhone 5 with HSPA+ capabilities (21Mbps) during a keynote at Macworld Asia 2011. The image above is from the presentation viaPC Watch.
Japanese IT News Site ” PC Watch “Tells That, Research vice president of China Unicom , Huan Wenliang, told iPhone five Will Support W-CDMA based high-speed Data Transfer standard HSPA Evolution “HSPA +” (21Mbps) at Keynote speech in Macworld Asia 2011.
We’ve heard rumors that Apple is in early testing of LTE-capable test devices, and we know AT&T has already started rolling out their HSPA+ tech and even marketing HSPA devices as “4G”.
Curiously, the Qualcomm Gobi MDM6600 chips found in the Verizon iPhone support HSPA+ data rates of up to 14.4 Mbps. Analysts are expecting a 4G LTE iPhone in 2012. (via MacRumors and MacPost)
Here’s the story (via Daring Fireball). The short of it is that Verizon asks the court not to issue Apple’s requested injunction against Samsung products because an injunction “is not in the public interest… It significantly limits consumer options and crippling the free flow of goods to Verizon and its customers”.
The obvious response is what injunction wouldn’t?
The question is: why would Verizon throw its weight behind Samsung in this battle now that it has the iPhone?
Perhaps Verizon isn’t as happy with the iPhone and as they were in early 2011.
Notice the love start to peel away in the video below. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was expecting to have an iPhone 5 this summer and counts that as a reason for missing targets in the third quarter. Revenues overall are flat and Verizon isn’t seeing the LTE money they were hoping for. Samsung obviously sells a bunch of LTE phones and Tablets that Verizon wants to capitalize on (and has a lot invested in) including the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Droid Charge, and the Droid Nexus Prime due out later this year…
Reutersreported this morning that top brass from China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier by both subscribers and market valuation, and Apple’s head honcho Steve Jobs met “several times on introducing an iPhone based on its network standard”. Did Jobs travel incognito or was he accompanying Apple’s operations wizard Tim Cook during his China tour (snapped paparazzi-style in the shot below)?
More likely, Jobs probably hosted China Mobile reps in Cupertino.
Interestingly, China Mobile counts a cool 7.44 million iPhone users on its network, although it doesn’t carry the handset yet and iPhone users cannot tap 3G speeds on their TD-SCDMA 3G network.
Apple’s been alleged previously as wanting to release an iPhone optimized for China Mobile’s fourth-generation TD-LTE network. The Wall Street Journalchimed in with sources saying the gadget maker and China Mobile are close to cutting a deal set to open up the carrier’s 600+ million subscribers to Apple’s phone. The highest-level meeting isn’t surprising considering that Apple is only “scratching surface” in China, having reported in the June quarter a sixfold growth in the country for a total of $3.8B in revenues from operations in the country.
About a month and a half ago, one of our Apple Store sources told us that some Verizon techs had visited that day and upgraded the in-store cell equipment to LTE. At the time, LTE iPhones seemed like a distant possibility for upcoming iPhones and a Verizon source told us that upgrades to cell boxes were happening somewhat arbitrarily all over the country. Tim Cook, in a conference call earlier this year, made it sound like LTE was going to have to wait until later builds.
Tim Cook said that these early generation LTE chips would require too many compromises in design.
But yesterday things changed when a report detailled the LTE (specifically Verizon in this case) strings that were pulled from a carrier version of iOS OTA updates. Could the changing of the iPhone release schedule be timed to allow Apple to get the most modern LTE chips in iPhones aas well as give the networks time to mature?
Fast forward to this today, where Engadget says AT&T is also upgrading its on-premise Apple Store Cells to LTE.
Sure, but it possible that AT&T is just building up its nationwide infrastructure ahead of its LTE rollout, which today it announced (below) was going to start in 5 cities next month and…
By the end of 2011, AT&T plans to offer 4G LTE to customers in at least 15 markets, covering 70 million Americans.
Realistically, does that sound like the type of mainstream network Apple will aim its iPhone 5 towards? Expand Expanding Close
One of the advantages of AT&T’s GSM iPhones (and iPads) is that they can roam just about anywhere in the world fairly easily. For that convenience, AT&T charges a hefty – some would say exorbitant – fee (illustrated above, left).
Today, AT&T has announced a significant (2.5-5x) drop in international fees.
You get 2.5 times the data for $25 which is now set at 50MB. At the high end, you get 4x the data, 800MB, for $200. And overages used to cost $5/MB(!!); now it is ‘just’ $10/10MB.
It is still far from cheap and smart travelers will continue to pick up a Mifi, unlock and use a local SIM or just stick to Wifi hotspots. But it is something, right? Expand Expanding Close
In a note last night, Wayne Lam of IHS-iSuppli made the case against Apple going with 1st generation LTE chips in its next iPhone.
“It remains to be seen whether the next Apple iPhone set for introduction in September will support 4G LTE,” said Wayne Lam, senior analyst for IHS. “However, if it does, two things are clear. First, the iPhone’s minuscule printed circuit board (PCB) will have to grow in size in order to support the first-generation LTE baseband processor as well as all the supporting chipset. Second, the next iPhone’s BOM value certainly will increase substantially compared to the iPhone 4 if LTE is implemented in the same manner as in the HTC Thunderbolt.”
I think Apple is more concerned with the extra space and battery life the new chips would consume much more than the extra cost of the components.“The first generation of LTE chipsets forced a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple chief financial officer, speaking at the company’s April 2011 earnings call.
The next round of chips which would allow Apple to put LTE in a similarly sized package won’t hit the streets until the first half of 2012.
I don’t see an iPhone as big at the Thundebolt or Charge, ever. Expand Expanding Close
Last Month, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo told an investor conference call that the Verizon iPhone would be a World phone. The CFO was also the first to reveal the Verizon iPad. Many think that the current Verizon iPhone’s inclusion of a worldphone-capable Gobi chip from Qualcomm is a preview into the future of the iPhone line.
While Verizon has sold fewer iPhones than some analysts expected, Shammo said he was happy with sales of the “six-month-old phone” that only works in some countries.
When the next iPhone model launches Verizon will be able to offer it at the same time as AT&T. Verizon’s version will also work in as many countries as AT&T’s iPhone, which has global coverage, Shammo said.
Some customers held off on buying the first Verizon iPhone because they were waiting for a model that supports Verizon’s high-speed wireless service, which runs on a new technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE).
Shammo said that even if the next iPhone does not support LTE, Verizon will have enough high-speed alternatives to sell.
That’s a pretty good clue that the next iPhone won’t be LTE, which Apple CFO Tim Cook all but revealed himself at the last earnings call:
COMPUTERWORLD: Smart investors are paying attention to Apple’s [AAPL] rapidly expanding iOS value chain, taking strategic holdings in Apple’s component supply partners, and this last few days has seen markets whisper one name, Skyworks Solutions [SWKS] — will that company drive LTE support to iPhone and iPad 2.0?
