Looks like I am eating some crow...maybe

[jersiq]

I among others prognosticated that there wouldn't be an IPhone on the VZW network and that instead Apple will go with a 4g device. Looks like I may be wrong. I honestly don't know this publication, so maybe others could chime in about it. It seems without a major announce from either company it may not be true:

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/sto...phone.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

SAN DIEGO (TheStreet) -- Apparently it's bakeoff season in tech, and the latest blue ribbon goes to Qualcomm (QCOM Quote).

Apple (AAPL Quote) has chosen Qualcomm as its chip supplier for the new version of the iPhone headed to Verizon (VZ Quote) this summer, according to Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar. Kumar confirmed the decision with the manufacturers and suppliers involved with the phone.
iPhone 3GS

The win is the second high-profile victory for the San Diego tech shop this week. On Tuesday, Google (GOOG Quote) announced that its Nexus One phone -- made by HTC -- will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip.

"It's looking like Qualcomm is beginning to be the one to beat," says Kumar, referring to the company's rising status in the smartphone race.

Apple representatives were not immediately available for comment. And a Qualcomm rep said "nothing has been disclosed yet."

The iPhone win, while huge for Qualcomm, doesn't involve its Snapdragon platform, but a 3G wireless technology chip for EV-DO, says Kumar.

Initially, Apple sought a chip that would allow it to sell a world phone, one that was compatible with the two leading wireless technologies -- GSM and CDMA.

But Qualcomm and others failed to deliver. Instead, Apple elected to go with Qualcomm in its Verizon iPhone, which is expected to arrive soon after AT&T's (T Quote) exclusive contract with Apple expires in June.

The loser in this deal is Germany's Infineon (IFNNY Quote), the chip supplier to the AT&T iPhone.

Qualcomm shares are up 3% so far this year, continuing what was a 25% gain for 2009.

-- Reported by Scott Moritz in New York

 

[pm]

I'd be really surprised if there's an EVDO iPhone... My prognostication was that there would be an Verizon LTE iPhone.

I'd still be very surprised that there wouldn't be a Verizon iPhone. Verizon is the largest carrier in the US... once the exclusivity agreement expires with AT&T, it makes no sense to me that Apple would ignore Verizon.

But given that Verizon is working on LTE with a large-scale launch this year - (confirmed again today in several articles: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357819,00.asp ), it seems like the iPhone running LTE would be a perfect fit for Verizon to show off their new high speed network prowess (LTE is 12Mb/s), and iPhone to add cachet by being one of the flagship models to be running on a 4G network.

 

[sygyzy]

Can you explain the difference between EVDO and LTE? Are they both 4G?

Edge
3G
4G <----?

Isn't coverage/rollout pretty primitive right now...?

 

[nismotigerwvu]

EVDO is to CDMA as 3G is to GSM

Simply put, the EVDO is the CDMA (Sprint/Verizon...ect) equivalent to what the GSM world (AT& T-mobile...ect) refers to as their 3G service. In reality it runs much deeper than that technically, but in terms of practical real life situations it is mostly true. The same goes for the 4G comparisons (LTE, being championed by the GSM world and verizon, against WiMax, supported by Sprint and maybe others I can't think of offhand). Each technology has their own strengths and weaknesses but the generations are a good starting point for comparisons.

 

[Pliablemoose]

What will be interesting is to see if Apple continues it's relationship with AT&T and selling iPhones through them...

To the best of my knowledge, Apple has maintained relationships with carriers in the past when the contract expired.

 

[Epic Fail]

What will be interesting is to see if Apple continues it's relationship with AT&T and selling iPhones through them...

To the best of my knowledge, Apple has maintained relationships with carriers in the past when the contract expired.

What past history did Apple have with another carrier?

 

[pm]

The whole 1G/2G/3G/4G naming scheme was supposed to be about generational deployments of GSM originally. But at some point it came to denote a grade of data bandwidth - well at least for the CDMA guys who seem to have co-opted the term.

So on the Verizon/Sprint side they are running "CDMA". For data, they have
1xRTT => 1G 60kb/s
EVDO rev.0 => 2G 120kb/s
EVDO rev.A => 3G 900kb/s

There's is no "4G" to speak of on the CDMA backwards-compatibile faster-data side because they abandoned EVDO rev.B. and then the plan was UMB as 4G but a little over a year ago, Qualcomm abandoned work on UMB and switched to LTE and thus CDMA has no direct future. You could think that the 4G for CDMA is WiMax (because WiMax isn't LTE) but WiMax is very different from EVDO and UMB and it would be tricky to make a CDMA backwards compatible WiMax phone.

On the AT&T/T-Mobile side they are running GSM. For data they have:
GPRS => 1G 60kb/s
EDGE => 2G 150kb/s
UMTS => 3G 900kb/s
HSDPA => 3.5G 4200kb/s
LTE => 4G 100000kb/s (theoretical)

and then there's WiMax which is 4G and is roughly 70Mb/s theoretical.

LTE hasn't really been publicly deployed, although there's a few cities across the world running it. There aren't really any phones using it that you can buy. Verizon is planning a US deployment of LTE starting this year to roughly 30 major US cities.

WiMax has started deployment in the US and is ahead of LTE in terms of number of markets deployed. It's running right now in Baltimore and other cities under the marketing name "XOhm". Another company called Clearwire is running WiMax in 23 US cities, and they are merging (merged already?) with Sprint.

AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon all have publicly announced plans to migrate to LTE starting this year (Verizon), and next year (T-Mobile and AT&T).

 

[Pliablemoose]

What past history did Apple have with another carrier?

Absolutely none, the iPhone is only sold in the US, right?

http://www.apple.com/iphone/countries/

 

[Fox5]

The whole 1G/2G/3G/4G naming scheme was supposed to be about generational deployments of GSM originally. But at some point it came to denote a grade of data bandwidth - well at least for the CDMA guys who seem to have co-opted the term.

So on the Verizon/Sprint side they are running "CDMA". For data, they have
1xRTT => 1G 60kb/s
EVDO rev.0 => 2G 120kb/s
EVDO rev.A => 3G 900kb/s

There's is no "4G" to speak of on the CDMA backwards-compatibile faster-data side because they abandoned EVDO rev.B. and then the plan was UMB as 4G but a little over a year ago, Qualcomm abandoned work on UMB and switched to LTE and thus CDMA has no direct future. You could think that the 4G for CDMA is WiMax (because WiMax isn't LTE) but WiMax is very different from EVDO and UMB and it would be tricky to make a CDMA backwards compatible WiMax phone.

On the AT&T/T-Mobile side they are running GSM. For data they have:
GPRS => 1G 60kb/s
EDGE => 2G 150kb/s
UMTS => 3G 900kb/s
HSDPA => 3.5G 4200kb/s
LTE => 4G 100000kb/s (theoretical)

and then there's WiMax which is 4G and is roughly 70Mb/s theoretical.

LTE hasn't really been publicly deployed, although there's a few cities across the world running it. There aren't really any phones using it that you can buy. Verizon is planning a US deployment of LTE starting this year to roughly 30 major US cities.

WiMax has started deployment in the US and is ahead of LTE in terms of number of markets deployed. It's running right now in Baltimore and other cities under the marketing name "XOhm". Another company called Clearwire is running WiMax in 23 US cities, and they are merging (merged already?) with Sprint.

AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon all have publicly announced plans to migrate to LTE starting this year (Verizon), and next year (T-Mobile and AT&T).

I'm pretty sure the G terminology originally referred to generation. 1G is analog, 2G is the first digital standard, 3g is the 2nd digital standard. It was later used for speed levels, in which case 1xRTT is well beyond the base 2g speed, but below 3g. Edge is actually at the base levels of 3g (a bit over 100KB/s), but is still considered 2g. Likewise, the top levels of of 3g (up to 28Mb/s) are within the speed levels of 4g technology (currently around 6Mb/s and likely to be around 20 to 30Mb/s when the technology reaches mass deployment), yet the speed levels referred to by 4g are supposed to be >100Mb/s. I severely doubt that will hold, however the 4g technologies promise up to 300Mb/s for LTE and up to 180Mb/s for Wimax.
I'm sure we'll see Wimax and LTE referred to as 4g no matter what speed they start at, even though 3g (for t-mobile at least) will still be as fast or faster.