Rumor du jour: HSDPA iPhone coming in June
The iPhone rumor mill is running at full throttle with the expectation that Apple will announce an HSDPA-enabled version in June. But given Apple's long history of delays, meeting this schedule--albeit 12 months after the original U.S. launch of the iPhone, could be a risky punt.
However, what appears to be solid information is that the current iPhone baseband supplier Infineon will provide the HSDPA chipset--a story reinforced by the German company also planning to ramp down production of the EDGE baseband solution used in the current generation of the iPhone in order to clear inventories ahead of the 3G model.
At a more curious level, UBS analyst Ben Reitzes speculated these new iPhones would be offered by new international operators.
While it remains unclear what this might mean, Morgan Stanley offered the bizarre explanation that Steve Jobs' travel expenses could provide the answer. Apparently, Jobs spent $550,000 on air travel--nearly three times more than the average spent over the past year and a half. Morgan Stanley claims that this was the need for Jobs' integral involvement with operators in Asia and Europe vying to secure iPhone contracts. Wow, that's an interesting hypothesis.
For more on this story:
- read this report from The Times
- check out this article from Apple Insider
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Chungwha Telecom wants to offer the iPhone, if it's 3G. Report
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Comments
Posted by Anonymous | March 4, 2008 - 11:52am
Infineon does not have HSDPA baseband in the market. Neither Apple nor Infineon know exactly what it takes to deploy HSDPA - simply because they never did it.
Infineon are probably working on HSDPA but if they have had a working HSDPA solution, we would have seen it in phones of its other customers already and could test it.
It can be very painful and long process - completely different from EDGE: Apple got a legacy EDGE baseband from Infineon.
Until we will see an Infineon HSDPA baseband in other Infineon customers, such as Samsung, we should not talk about an iPhone with HSDPA Infineon baseband because Apple won’t be the first to deploy it – they don’t have the required field test operation for early adopters in place.
