New iPhone will be subsidized, faster and thinner

by billso on Tuesday, 29 April 2008

iPhone party by nobihaya on flickr Accord­ing to For­tune, AT&T will sell the 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPhone with a US$200 sub­sidy when it goes on sale on or around 27 June 2008. I’ve com­piled a list of my billso.com iPhone arti­cles below, as they con­tain hints or infor­ma­tion about iPhone 2.0

It’s an Inter­est­ing way to mark the first year of the iPhone, and it’s unlikely that AT&T will lose money, given the costs of data plans for the iPhone. The sub­sidy may or may not be avail­able at Apple’s retail stores.

Those dis­counts would make the 8GB model US$199 with a new 2-year con­tract, and the 16GB model US$299. Those prices make the iPhone more attrac­tive for con­sumers. Expect to see more iPhones in Star­bucks stores around July, as cus­tomers use AT&T WiFi access points to down­load songs and videos from iTunes.

The new model iPhone will be 2.5 mm thin­ner than the orig­i­nal model, and will also have 3G, GPS and 802.11n chipsets. Cur­rent mod­els sup­port the slower EDGE pro­to­col, a sim­u­lated GPS sys­tem and 802.11 b/g WiFi connections

It will also include ver­sion 2.0 firmware, which will sup­port Microsoft Exchange servers. It will be inter­est­ing to see what AT&T charges its cor­po­rate cus­tomers for iPhones.

Many of these items will help some CIOs jus­tify the iPhone as a cor­po­rate device. RIM is prepar­ing its own “iPhone killer” model to sup­port its Black­berry line, accord­ing to this New York Times arti­cle.

The new firmware will also sup­port true appli­ca­tions for the iPhone, instead of web-based apps.

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Tagged as: 3g, Apple, at&t, CIO, email, GPS, GSM, iPhone, iTunes, Microsoft, mobile, WiFi

  • http://billso.com billso

    Engad­get claims the release date may be 29 June 2008, based on a leaked AT&T memo that asks retail store employ­ees not to take vaca­tion between 15 June and 15 July. A sim­i­lar memo went out last year, in advance of the 29 June 2007 release of iPhone 1.0

  • http://billso.com billso

    The new iPhone will be thin­ner. Told ya so!

  • http://billso.com billso

    There’s more con­fir­ma­tion in <a href=http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idCAN3044154720080602” rel=“nofollow”>this Reuters article.

    “We think that actu­ally Apple could talk about a very dis­rup­tive busi­ness model, or a change in their busi­ness model, embrac­ing sub­si­dies where nec­es­sary, mul­ti­ple car­ri­ers to help get the iPhone into more hands,” Lehman Broth­ers ana­lyst Ben Reitzes told a con­fer­ence call last week.

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