Wow. Thanks for that link. I wonder what AT&Ts performance agreements are. Must be pretty stringent.
Umm, the USA Today article had absolutely zero mention of 3G. It only mentions that ATT has a 5 year exclusive contract for the Apple iPhone and subsequent versions. This means, there won't be a CDMA iPhone in the USA that'll work on Verizon or Sprint networks. In 3 or 4 years, when Sprint may be bought, and Verizon moves to 4G GSM, and Apple has a 4G GSM iPhone, maybe a brave few will void-their-warranty and unlock the phone to work on a non-ATT network.
ATT does in fact have a 3G UMTS/HSDPA network. It doesn't have as good the coverage that Verizon's 3G EV-DO network has, nor the bandwidth, but it is about 5 to 10 times faster than EDGE, and the iPhone's reason for selling really is the always available web-surfing.
So, I think an iPhone with HSPDA/HSUPDA/UMTS is coming next year, obviously, exclusive to ATT. One just has to place your bets on what's Apple product cycle with the iPhone is. Is it 1 year like the iPhone? Obviously not since that dropped the price immediately after launch. They took a bet at $600 and had to go to a backup plan imo in order to get more sales for 4Q 07. This does leave a big hole in the price lineup above $400 for a 2 model line-up. If Apple fills it, I'm not sure its a refresh in the product cycle, but a completion of it.
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Wow. Thanks for that link. I wonder what AT&Ts performance agreements are. Must be pretty stringent.
Umm, the USA Today article had absolutely zero mention of 3G. It only mentions that ATT has a 5 year exclusive contract for the Apple iPhone and subsequent versions. This means, there won't be a CDMA iPhone in the USA that'll work on Verizon or Sprint networks. In 3 or 4 years, when Sprint may be bought, and Verizon moves to 4G GSM, and Apple has a 4G GSM iPhone, maybe a brave few will void-their-warranty and unlock the phone to work on a non-ATT network.
ATT does in fact have a 3G UMTS/HSDPA network. It doesn't have as good the coverage that Verizon's 3G EV-DO network has, nor the bandwidth, but it is about 5 to 10 times faster than EDGE, and the iPhone's reason for selling really is the always available web-surfing.
So, I think an iPhone with HSPDA/HSUPDA/UMTS is coming next year, obviously, exclusive to ATT. One just has to place your bets on what's Apple product cycle with the iPhone is. Is it 1 year like the iPhone? Obviously not since that dropped the price immediately after launch. They took a bet at $600 and had to go to a backup plan imo in order to get more sales for 4Q 07. This does leave a big hole in the price lineup above $400 for a 2 model line-up. If Apple fills it, I'm not sure its a refresh in the product cycle, but a completion of it.