Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Apple’s iPhone is finally coming to Verizon Wireless, ending years of oppressive exclusivity with AT&T and its less than popular wireless network. Except this time, there appears to be some concrete evidence to support the claim, rather than just the word of analysts on Wall Street.
Electronista is reporting that Apple may be “edging closer” to the fabled Verizon Wireless-capable iPhone come January of next year, with a report from TechCrunch claiming that CDMA chipset maker Qualcomm is queuing up “millions” of Verizon-compatible chips for a production run kicking off in December.
Sources also claim that a Verizon iPhone 4 would feature the same design, but are speculating that Apple may include “an internal insulator to prevent finger contact from bridging the antennas” -- which would likely also include the next wave of GSM-based models as well.
Experts in the matter claim that December manufacturing is likely “consistent with a launch at the start of 2011,” and that Apple would have to separate their production run to accommodate a CDMA model which “would not only need a different chipset but would eliminate the micro SIM card slot if it’s not a dual-mode device.”
On the surface, this might appear to be nothing more than a repeat of past rumors, but the new wrinkle appears to be Qualcomm itself. The chipmaker is necessary to any CDMA iPhone plans, since Apple’s current partners like Infineon and Skyworks don’t produce CDMA hardware -- Qualcomm “virtually dominates the category.”
CDMA is often viewed as not essential to Apple’s big picture, given that most of the carriers worldwide use the GSM standard to begin with, and even CDMA carriers are planning to switch to the GSM network’s 4G standard called LTE -- although that isn’t expected until 2012 at the earliest. That leaves U.S. carriers like Sprint and Verizon -- as well as a handful of international carriers such as China Telecom -- playing the waiting game where Apple’s iPhone is concerned.
However, Apple’s continued iPhone growth in the United States is largely pinned on expansion to at least one other major carrier, if not all of them eventually. T-Mobile is the only other GSM-based network in the U.S., but the company’s 3G service uses a radio band not currently compatible with the iPhone. That leaves only Verizon or Sprint, both of which use CDMA technology.
For now, the wait continues…
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
