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Dulaney: 3G iPhone on the way
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 28th March 2008
Could Steve be planning to re-release the iPhone with the high-speed connectivity it should have had in the first place?
At least, that's the rumour going around courtesy of Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney, who claims that Apple has already placed an order for ten million iPhones equipped with 3G connectivity, something that was strangely missing in the original build.
Dulaney is adamant that his sources are good, and claims that the release of the 3G iPhone has been bumped up the calendar due to the slow take-up of the EDGE-equipped model in Europe. That, at least, is plausible – we know that the iPhone has been met with resounding apathy here in the UK, and at least part of the reason for that (aside from its wallet-shredding cost) is lack of support for high-speed data transfer, something we've come to expect from a smartphone which will spend a lot of its time connected to the Internet.
Whether that's enough to make Apple admit defeat and introduce a new model so soon after the launch of the original remains to be seen. If it's true, then it's clear that early adopters will be getting it in the shorts.
The information given by Dulaney matches up with rumours from November 2007 in which Spanish mobile network Telefonica claimed they would be releasing a 3G iPhone to their customers some time in May.
I guess it all boils down to one question: would Apple really treat early adopters – by definition their biggest proponents – so shabbily as to introduce a new iPhone model which many would say is what the iPhone should have been from day one so soon after the European launch?
I guess we'll know more some time in May.
Do you think Apple is doing the right thing releasing a 3G iPhone, and will it convince you that it's a must-have gadget; or do you think that Apple owes all the first-generation iPhone owners some common courtesy? Share your opinion over in the forums.
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Comments (12)
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I like my ipod as much as the next person who's too lazy to find an alternative or migrate my music library from itunes... I would like to get me a modbook (yes, a "mod"... book, not a misspelling) so I'm not an apple hater by any means. But this is a frickin phone. Please please stop. I don't care if they put 3G in it, does the tech world spray their shorts if Nokia add HSDPA to one of their low on features mid-range handsets? No, because no one cares.
No, the time to do that would have been yesterday.
HTH
The camera lets it down heavily as well everyone I know wants a mobile phone so they can take pictures and videos when out and about after can it make phone calls and send txts.
So when phone companies are claiming hsdpa is faster 3g, i presume they are just talking about speeds?
Actually, since O2 updated the contracts 2 months ago (ish), they are actually quite competitive, as they line up with the normal O2 ones.
In the same way GPRS is 2.5G and Edge is 2.75G, it's just naming conventions for a selection of different technologies. However, the bit that links them is all 2G techs work on the standard 2G GSM network infrastructure, where as all 3G techs (e.g. UMTS, HDSPA) require a totally different network infrastructure. If you've perfect GSM network coverage, and have a suitable phone, you can access GPRS and Edge, but that won't help if you want to use any 3G techs, you need good UMTS (3G) network coverage as well, which is why the iPhone didn't have a 3G connection, because there's simply very little UMTS network coverage in the US, it would have been pretty redundant.