Jun 13 2011
iPhone 5 September Timeframe
It’s been no real secret the last few weeks we knew Apple would not be announcing the iPhone 5 at WWDC. Instead we received a preview of iOS 5 and was given a time frame of this fall. Fall officially starts September 21st and there is one other thing that is interesting. Earlier this year Verizon Wireless announced they were expanding into 145 more markets by the end of 2011 bringing LTE to a massive chunk of the US and also talked of having complete coverage by 2013 when they expect to be able to ship phones without 3g radios. We know Apple is not stupid and that many competitors have shipped LTE enabled phones and have even started touting this as a feature the iPhone does not have.
The iPhone 5 will be a LTE enabled phone. The only downside is that these radios are power-hungry, but it’s possible that there’s a new chipset that Qualcomm has kept hushed about and is working with Apple on the new radio. It may be that 3G is the default radio if you turn off your 4g radio. It is also possible that Apple would release a 5g iPhone that’s not LTE enabled and release a new phone 6 months later in the spring. However, this did not go well when Apple pulled this with the original iPhone.