The iPhone’s next destination may be T-Mobile and not Verizon, says The Street.
AT&T will lose its exclusive agreement to sell the iPhone sometime next year and Verizon has been the leading candidate to take on the popular Apple phone next, but analyst Doug Reid disputes that assumption. Apple already sells phones through Germany’s T-Mobile unit, and their GSM system is similar to AT&T’s.
But T-Mobile USA with 33 million customers, has less than half the subscriber base as Verizon Wireless with 71 million customers.
Verizon is the largest wireless player in the United States. Rumors suggest a possible GSM/CDMA hybrid model that would work on CDMA networks like Verizon’s, in addition to GSM/UTMS-based networks that the current iPhone models work with.
What’s more likely, Reid says, is that Verizon makes a deal to sell other Apple devices like the elusive Apple Tablet and the next version of the iPhone running on LTE in their 700 MHz band.
Apple may already be testing its next-generation iPhone hardware in the San Francisco area near its Cupertino headquarters, says ArsTechnica. The iBART app, which is used to navigate San Francisco’s train system, uses Pinch Media analytics to log usage statistics such as iPhone model and software version number. Usage logs revealed early testing of the iPhone 3GS last year, eight months before it launched this past summer.
South Korea sold about 60,000 iPhones on launch day, a far cry from the 1 million sold in the US for the iPhone 3GS but far more than the estimated 5,000 sold in the first week in China.
