“SK Telecom and Apple are expected to unveil an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) phone in the coming months,” Kim Yoo-chul reports for The Korea Times.
“The news came a few days after its biggest rival Samsung Electronics introduced its LTE-A phone last Thursday. LTE-A is an upgraded version of LTE (long-term evolution), which is a standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for handsets,” Kim reports. “‘SK Telecom is approaching Apple to put our LTE-A technology on the upcoming iPhone 5S. We are in the middle of negotiations,’ said an SK Telecom executive, requesting anonymity.”
Kim reports, “The SK Group affiliate said it plans to have as many as seven LTE-A devices available by the end of the year. LTE-A enables customers to use the next iPhone to download data at a speed of 150Mbps, twice as fast as its predecessor. Because Korea has recently seen a huge demand for devices supporting high-speed networks, Apple intends to use Korea as the litmus test to gauge the marketability of LTE-A technology before making inroads into China, according to industry sources.”
Read more in the full article here.
While, if true, this would be quite proactive, it runs counter to Apple’s history with the iPhone. Apple has always waited for the infrastructure to be there in a significant fraction of its markets before shifting the iPhone to the new transmission scheme. This was true for the shift from 2.5G to 3G to “4G” (really HSPA+) and LTE. LTE-A deployments are few and far between today and will be for many, many months to come.
Additionally, if Apple is going to ship the iPhone 5S en mass in September/October, production will have to start in August — late August at the very latest. In order to meet that timeline there is absolutely NO WAY Apple is still in discussion with technology suppliers as to what might, or might not, go into the iPhone 5S. The technology in the iPhone 5S that is hardware dependent (e.g., LTE versus LTE-A) has been locked down for at least a couple months.
The first rule of Apple club is don’t talk about Apple club.
The object of that story is raise the idea of faster speeds, so that when the phone comes out it will be “a disappointment” when it doesn’t have them. Korean standard FUD.
This sort of stuff goes on all the time before new Apple products are announced. There always these blabber-mouth bloggers making up all kinds of rumors about what the next Apple product “might” have. It’s really so ridiculous. Why is it that these people need to take liberties about what Apple is going to bring to market and why should it even matter? We’ll all know when Apple makes the announcement. Anyone who gets disappointed over of rumors after they find out the actual product doesn’t have said rumor feature are just idiots.
All this talk about fingerprint readers could really let those people in for a big disappointment if the iPhone doesn’t have one. I could make up anything that pops into my head and so could these overly imaginative bloggers. I honestly hope investors don’t base their stock purchases on rumors.
I heard Apply is in final testing with holographic 3D displays.
Please fasten you seatbelts