iOS4 Blog: The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

iPhone 5 News Blog Sunday Coffee: 4G or not 4G? That Is the Question

Posted: 12 Jun 2011 07:35 AM PDT

In spite of the fact that early evidence shows that the iPhone 5 will not support 4G, a surprising report appeared in the news this week from the Gulf, with a top-level executive from a Dubai iPhone carrier eluding the possibility of an iPhone 5 with 4G capabilities. While the rest of the tech community is deciding if the suggestion is credible, we ask you: how important is 4G to you?

Doubtless you’ve heard something of the recent comments of Ali Al Ahmad, the Chief Corporate Communication Officer at Dubai-based iPhone carrier Etisalat, who said a couple days ago: "Yes, we are in talks with most smartphone manufacturers including Apple on the rollout of the 4G handset, iPhone 5 later this year. As the first telecom organisation to roll out the 4G network, LTE, in the Middle East, we have already started talking to them for the handsets and chipsets in them."

Rumors are rumors are rumors, but when the Chief Corporate Communication Officer of a major mobile carrier makes comments like these, it does give you a bit of pause with regards to whether or not the iPhone 5 could indeed turn out to be Apple’s first 4G smartphone.

Ubergizmo countered this story by saying that “We've previously heard confirmation from Apple themselves that there won't be any LTE iPhones this year, so this announcement contradicts what has been previously said before,” but I could not find anywhere on Ubergizmo’s website or the news at large where anyone from Apple themselves stated that there would be no 4G in the 2011 iPhone’s specs — only the (albeit informed) opinion of Jefferies & Company Apple analyst Peter Misek, who said back in May and reported by CNET that “Apple’s next iPhone won’t sport LTE hardware from Qualcomm because the chipmaker “is currently not achieving yields sufficient for inclusion in the iPhone 5.”

You can read a hand-selected collection of stories about the iPhone 5 4G debate on our new and ultra-experimental iPhone 5 News Ticker website .

But while this debate — who to believe, the Dubai executive or the Apple analyst — rages on, the bigger question is, how important it is to you that the iPhone 5 gets 4G capabilities this year?