AT&T may be subsidizing up to $425 of the cost of each new iPhone it activates for service when the 2.0 3G models launch next month, Barron’s reports.

According to Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner, AT&T will cover an additional $125 premium over the carrier’s typical $200 smartphone subsidy because the company thinks the iPhone will increase subscribers and average revenue per user. Apple will receive an additional $100 bounty for every new AT&T customer who signs for service at an Apple Store.

The early book on the new phone is very bullish, with Reiner calling for 15 million units to be sold in 2008 and another 33 million in 2009.

At its developer event his morning, Apple showed off the iPhone and iPod touch OS 2.0, which is quite an amazing update. It’s got fully loaded Exchange ActiveSync support, a full SDK opening up the complete iPhone toolkit – Spore and Super Monkey Ball for iPhone and touch look awesome and will challenge the DS and PSP – and it’s just got everything that was missing from the original iPhone (though no word on cut and paste yet…).

It’s great – but it’s not shipping until June. The software is in Beta today (you can apply to participate here), and developers have access to download the SDK now. Appl software will be distributed through the iPhone Apps store, available in desktop iTunes and over-the-air iTunes. It’s a slick system, and free applications will carry no fee for developers or customers. Commercial apps will give Apple a 30 percent royalty “to maintain the cost of the Apps store” and 70 percent of revenue to the developer. It’s a little onerous, but it’s good visibility for developers. Beyond which, the upgrade is free to iPhone owners and a “nominal charge” for touch users, who get screwed again.

One more thing about “late June” – that’s the one-year anniversary of the iPhone’s release. And Apple calls it iPhone 2.0. I guarantee that there will be significantly upgraded hardware out there to ship at the same time. Can you say iPhone 3G? I knew you could!

Live from Apple’s iPhone SDK press conference – Engadget

Tags: iphone, ipodtouch, apple, stevejobs, sdk, enterprise

Seven minutes into today’s highly anticipated iPhone SDK conference, Phil Schiller has dropped a bomb on Apple Campus – the iPhone is getting full MS Exchange ActiveSync supoprt, including:

• Push email
• Push calendar
• Push contacts
• Global address list
• Cisco IPSec VPN
• Certificates and Identities

Basically all the big stuff that’s held the iPhone back from mass corporate adoption. This and a physical keyboard have been the only things RIM BlackBerry has over the iPhone, and it should mean a huge boost to sales for Apple. I think the physical keyboard is less relevant than a lot of people do. Die-hard Blackberry and Treo users will miss it, but most of us won’t mind so much.

Live from Apple’s iPhone SDK press conference – Engadget

Tags: iphone, sdk, exchange, enterprise

At this point, I think there are really only three legitimate complaints about the iPhone:

1. It only runs at EDGE speeds. Sure, it loads pages fast once it connects, but 3G would make it sing.
2. The chrome bezel around the screen – iPod touch is way classier.
3. It’s tied to a single network in each country where it’s available.

Well, according to Apple COO Tim Cook, maybe we won’t have to live with the last one for very long (and we all pray that 3G is coming any day now…). According to MarketWatch, Cook said that Apple wasn’t wedded to the exclusive, single-carrier business model.

While that sounds like great news for anyone that wants an iPhone on T-Mobile, his meaning is actually unclear. While I’d love to say that this is a clear rift with AT&T and iPhones will start popping up unlocked for everyone direct from Apple, that would be a lie.

Absent other information, it sounds more to me like Cook is saying that Apple is open to bringing the iPhone to new markets without tying up with a specific carrier. In other words, South Africa, you may have your pick of iPhone carriers. Let’s hope it eventually makes it back to the U.S.

Apple ‘not wedded’ to iPhone sales model – MarketWatch

Via Digg.

Tags: iphone, apple, tim cook, announcement

The news we’ve been waiting on for more than a year has finally arrived. According to Gizmodo, Apple this morning sent out invitations to an event at Apple Town Hall in Cupertino on March 6th to launch the software developer kit for the iPhone. Of particular note on the “roadmap” image included with the invitation is the prominent sign reading “Enterprise.” This certainly connects with the rumblings of Lotus support that have emerged in the last few weeks, and I hope it means Exchange Active Sync support. If the iPhone has integrated push e-mail support for Exchange, Apple will really start to breathe down the necks of RIM, the top-selling North American smartphone maker. It would put Apple in line to really put iPhones in the pockets of a lot more executives immediately.

Very exciting. Stay tuned, folks. I really hope that Apple allows every application developer who’s interested to make their software available for the iPhone. That’s what’s made the underground iPhone app community so exciting – the sheer creativity of the freeware community.

Apple Event for the iPhone SDK: March 6th

Tags: apple, iphone, sdk, iphone sdk, iphonesdk, exchange, enterprise, software

Though many, including me, had looked to this morning as an opportunity for Apple to release upgrade MacBook Pros, Apple pulled a switcheroo and rolled out upgraded iPhones and iPod touches. They’re tricksome, they are!

Unfortunately, the new models – a 16 gig iPhone for and a 32 gig iPod touch – offer nothing more than additional storage and a higher price tag. Each will go for $499. Other than the capacity, they’re identical under the hood. Anyone waiting for 3G data or a GPS chip? You’ll just have to wait. My guess is we’ll see a true second-generation iPhone in June, for the one-year anniversary of the original’s release date.

Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market has been a pretty spectacular success in its first six months on the market, according to research house Canalys. As Roughly Drafted notes, in North America, the iPhone is the No. 2 smartphone platform, not just model. It trails only the full BlackBerry market at this point, but is ahead of all combined Windows Mobile devices. This confirms an earlier NPD report that Apple was commanding about 27 percent of the smartphone market. In honor of this moment, let’s look back at some memorable quotes of the last year:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
— Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
— Ed Colligan, Palm CEO

“They would have been stepping in between us and our customers to the point where we would have almost had to take a back seat “¦ on hardware and service support.”
— Jim Gerace, Verizon Wireless VP

“What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures.”
— John Dvorak, International Tool
Ah, memories.

Via Daring Fireball

Image: Linksys

Remember a year ago, when the iPhone was announced? No, not Apple’s iPhone, the VoIP product line from Cisco’s Linksys product line! Though Cisco enjoyed a lot of press after Steve Jobs gave Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch wonderphone the same name, but then the other iPhone sort of vanished. What’s happened since?

Not much, actually. As our colleague Rob Beschizza reports for Wired News, the Linksys iPhone is selling OK, and the company plans to roll out new models under the name. But the name iPhone is Apple’s. No one, not even the most contrarian anti-Apple antagonists, thinks of seamless VoIP calls when they hear the name.

But a year on, Apple has its iPhone and Cisco has its iPhone, and no one confuses one with the other. And everybody’s happy with that, as Cisco spokesperson Karen Sohl says:

Relations with Apple, Sohl said, are good. “There’s no bad blood,” she said. “We enjoy working with Apple.”

Whatever Happened to the Other iPhone? [Wired News]

The entire world went crazy in the last 24 hours, as investors and rumor-mongers alike realized that maybe, just maybe, Apple might possibly sort of, update the iPhone with new features at some point in the future. All of the hullabaloo was set off when AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, repeatedly pressed for information about higher-speed iPhones, said “You’ll have it next year!”

And just like that, the stock jumped up. It’s so funny. I’m going to go further, and announce that at some point in the future, Apple will release an iPhone with more storage, GPS, better typing, more applications, games and faster WiFi. Some of those features will be delivered in 2008. Does the stock go up now?

Image via Flickr

AppleTell grabbed this snapshot off of the Apple Canada website, which seems to announce that the iPhone is finally coming to Canada. Normally, I’d take that as a sure sign that Apple has a product announcement coming tomorrow — Apple loves Tuesdays, after all. But since the MacBook update showed up on a Thursday, I’ll shoot for the end of the week.

Via Digg.