Wow, big news! The iPhone 4S is officially coming to a fourth American network in the coming weeks!
Bad news for the millions of T-Mobile customers using their jailbroken iPhones on the fourth-largest American wireless network, though: the iPhone 4S is coming to a network you’ve probably never heard of.
More than 75 percent of the handsets T-Mobile sells are smartphones, the carrier told a gathering at this week’s Mobilize 2011 forum held in San Francisco. What’s more, 90 percent of those smartphones are powered by the Android operating system.
If you’re a T-Mobile customer assuming that the big pink T will be getting the iPhone 5 this year just by dint of it being in bed with AT&T over a possible merger, think again.
In an odd bit of trash talk aimed at itself, AT&T replied to a Department of Justice objection to the acquisition of T-Mobile USA, the Dallas-based carrier saying T-Mobile is tiny and unlikely to be upgraded by its German parent. Additionally, AT&T said it has spent $30 billion upgrading its network between 2008 and 2010 and customers are still complaining.
And the dog pile’s on. Less than a week after the Department of Justice moved to block AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile, Sprint has sued both carriers to help ensure the deal doesn’t go through.
Despite no sign of an announcement from Apple for several weeks, T-Mobile has already begun accepting iPhone 5 reservations in Germany, according to a report from the German newspaper Focus. The carrier has been providing customers with ‘tickets’ that will allow them to redeem the device as soon as it’s available on a first-come-first-served basis.
Apple iPhone users, eagerly awaiting the extra bandwidth from AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile may have to tighten their belts. The U.S. Department of Justice Wednesday filed an antitrust lawsuit, blocking approval of the $39 billion deal on grounds it will “substantially lessen competition.”
A new report says that when the iPhone 5 debuts in Fall, it will launch simultaneously on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. It’s about time.
More interesting? Despite the fact that over a million iPhone users are on T-Mobile already, they are doing so without 3G access, just EDGE. When the iPhone 5 comes around, that’s about to change.
With AT&T in the process of gobbling up T-Mobile, and with rumors consistently suggesting that Apple will bring the iPhone 5 to T-Mobile, it’s hard not to think of this as significant: T-Mobile is now giving out iPhone 4 compatible Micro SIMs to their customers.
The entire Internet is aflame, at least by. The standards of your average Saturday night, on word that Boy Genius Report has gotten ahold of a strange pre-production white iPhone 4 loaded up with admin and field-testing apps and running quite nicely on T-Mobile 3G. That’s quite newsworthy, as no shipping iPhone supports the obscure 1700 MHz AWS band that T-Mo rolls in the U.S.
There are many number of ways of faking this — I still find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t take some serious pictures of the hardware in search of differences from the existing iPhone 4 if you actually had it in your hands — but the various software screens are fairly convincing, including a number of apps I’ve heard are used in testing, but that mere mortals like us never see.
On the one hand, it makes sense for Apple to expand it’s reach to as many standards as possible now, especially since AT&T will likely own T-Mobile unless anti-trust regulators hold up the acquisition. On the other hand, the intent of that deal is to convert all of T-Mo’s towers to LTE fairly rapidly. It’s interesting.
Have a look through the gallery and let us know what you think — I’m actually most skeptical of Apple Connect. Would Apple really copy pattern unlock from Android?