- Friday, 27 November 2009
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Liars when they speak the truth are not believed - Aristotle
Jobs would be crazy to announce a 3G Iphone
THANKS TO a leak from AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson, everyone is predicting that Apple will announce a 3G Iphone in 2008. But next week at Macworld San Fran would be a very bad idea indeed.
When Duke Jobs of Cupertino makes his keynote on Tuesday 15th January, it will be almost exactly one year after the Iphone was formally launched. So announcing an improved model would be a logical move.
However, according to our source, while a 3G version almost certainly already exists, it would cause havoc in Europe – the market in which 3G has most allure.
Our man reckons there are so many previous generation EDGE Iphones kicking around the channel – especially in the UK – that a 3G announcement would wreak havoc with Iphone sales. Punters would simply wait for the 3G version to arrive.
So he predicts it is far more likely that Jobs will simply restrict himself
to outlining the new features in the latest version of the Iphone – 1.1.3.
This would explain why a video of an Iphone sporting version 1.1.3 appeared at
the end of last month on
Gear
Live.
Improvements in 1.1.3 apparently include multi-person SMS/text sending (oh, wow)
and the new 'Locate Me' feature in Google Maps.
1.1.3's existence is so well publicised that sister news site,
VNUNet, has already reported
a malware app claiming to prepare the Iphone for the new software release.
Talking of fictitious rumours, the INQ discovered the claim that French unlocked
Iphones feature a 'country only' lock is untrue. Orange’s Louis-Michel Aymard
denied it entirely in an email to news site
Ilounge.
It is easy to see how the rumour arose. It is actually true that handsets can be locked to a particular country – it's merely one of four options.
The other three are locking to a particular operator (the most popular lock);
locking to a tariff (restricting it to a prepaid or a contract SIM); or locking
it down to one particular SIM card.
What probably happened to cause the rumour is that the Iphone in question was
suffering from a well known Iphone bug - mistaking country CLIs.
That's where the Iphone gets very confused as to the country from which a call is originating.
Brit unlocker, Iphoneunlockuk, claims it is the only unlocker to offer a full European CLI bug fix. µ
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Completely agree, the business logic wouldn't support an announcement this early. If it was announced at MacWorld it would need to go on sale within a month to prevent sales taking a dive (Apple's profits come from hardware sales not iTunes, etc). With sluggish sales Europe arguably needs the 3G iPhone most but releasing it two or three months after the original would p**s off European customers.
The 3G iPhone will probably come out in June, one year after the original but it will be announced in May and the release will probably be worldwide (no release of the iPhone yet in Asia remember). Both Europe and Asia would get a boost from a 3G iPhone so a US first release wouldn't make sense.
As for MacWorld announcement, the new firmware 1.1.3 doesn't sound enough but the rumours of this seem pretty conclusive that it will come and what it will contain. 
I would have expected a bigger, 1.2.1 release uncrippling bluetooth and providing landscape keyboards outside of Safari, voice dialing, disk support and a few of the other things on the iPhone user wishlist (remember Apple saying it could sort out a lot of the complaints with software updates?). 
It is likely, therefore, that there could be an announcement of a 16GB EGDE iPhone to tide things over until May and the announcement of the 3G version. Not to mention one or two more firmware updates along the way...
I have it on good authority that come March when Apple launches the iPhone in Canada it will be a 3g model.

Noxious Bob, please cite your sources...
Seems that Bob is not the type of person that represents reliable sources..........or rather is authorityless