Revenge: iPhone 5 release date has AT&T, Verizon, Sprint serve it cold

Revenge is a dish best served cold. And so as the four major carriers look to serve up the iPhone 5 as a treat to those who’ve been patiently waiting for its release date, they’re each preparing to take out the legs of their own customer base in their own special way. There’s Verizon, who’s prepared to tell you how often you can use your iPhone for basic tasks. Rival AT&T wants to do the same, but it’ll put your life into slow motion instead of charging you extra. T-Mobile is busy pulling off the double-dish stunner of folding itself into the kind of carrier most of its customers were specifically trying to avoid while still... leaving them in iPhone limbo. And Sprint, well, there’s no telling what the nation’s soon to be smallest carrier will serve up with regards to the iPhone, if at all. Welcome to a universe in which the iPhone 5 (here’s more on the iPhone 5 release date) is the steak dinner you want to dine on, and the U.S. carriers are the only four restaurants in town with it on the menu.

Verizon is busy building what will be the nation’s fastest 4G network by far. And surveys show its network quality to already be ahead of that of AT&T. So go ahead and order your iPhone 5 steak dinner at Le chez de Verizon. Just don’t expect healthy portions. Even as the carrier plans to make its network faster, it’ll tell new customers that they can only use it for a certain amount of bandwidth each month or face stunning overage charges on a per-megabyte basis. So even as your email is flying into your inbox, be careful of large attachments. And forget about downloading movies from iTunes or streaming music music from Spotify. And this is after Verizon made its customers wait four years for their iPhone entree to arrive…


Then there’s AT&T, which many longtime iPhone users have stuck with despite the presence of Verizon iPhone 4 this year for one simple reason: the unlimited data plans which they’ve been grandfathered into. Good thing, too, because Verizon just cut off unlimited data plans for new iPhone customers. So staying put at el AT&T ristorante paid off, right? Wrong. Shortly after Verizon slammed the unlimited iPhone data door, AT&T conveniently let it be known that as of the iPhone 5 era it’ll be throttling data speeds for those who go through a healthy amount of email and internet usage each month. That’s right: you’ll be paying for unlimited, and you’ll get it, but at slower speeds as the month goes on. That makes AT&T the all-you-can-eat steak buffet which forces you to start eating really slowly if you go back for seconds or thirds…


T-Mobile customers, on the other hand, can’t win. They spent all these years using the smaller, friendlier carrier in order to avoid the likes of big bad AT&T, even though it meant not having access to the iPhone. But now T-Mobile is about to merge into AT&T, meaning its customers will be folded into the carrier they were trying to avoid all these years. And because the merger is expected to take a year or more to finalize, the AT&T iPhone 5 won’t automatically become a T-Mobile iPhone 5 unless Apple and T-Mobile make special accommodations in the mean time. That makes T-Mobile the mom and pop restaurant that you drive past the big chain restaurant to get to, and then once you get there you find out they’ve been bought out by the big chain you drove past and they’re serving the same watered down steak. And then they tell you that your steak won’t be ready until the merger goes through.

Poor Sprint. All it would need to do is cut a deal with Apple and it would have the iPhone , and yet it just never happens with each passing iPhone generation. Now Sprint is about to become the smallest major carrier and the only carrier without the iPhone 5, two things which weren’t true until T-Mobile went and got bought out, and now it’s vulnerable. Sprint could end up being the white knight for iPhone users if it lands the iPhone 5 and offers it with friendly plans and terms. Or Sprint could get bought out by Verizon in response to the AT&T – T-Mobile merger. That makes Sprint the comfy-looking restaurant with the mystery meat, at least for now. Here’s more on the iPhone 5.

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Posted in: Apple

iPhone 5 imitator 'hiPhone 5' emerges in China

A fake iPhone 5, based on leaked images of the next-generation iPhone and called the hiPhone 5, has been spotted for sale in China.

Reuters reports that the items are for sale on e-commerce platform Taobao for as little at 200 yuan (around £19 or $31).

However, the quality of the hiPhone 5s varies, and to get a top-of-the-range fake you'll need to part with 800 yuan (£76) or more. According to the Shanghai-based daily newspaper Metro Express the hiPhone 5 is thinner than the iPhone 4 with less rounded edges.

It's based on images that have supposedly leaked from supply chain sources and is said to be extremely lightweight, feeling almost like a plastic toy, the reports state.

Fake Apple products are hardly new in the far east, though more recently entirely fake Apple Stores have been springing up, as Macworld reported last month.

Meanwhile, more iPhone 5 fakery has been exposed this week when a video purporting to show the next-generation iPhone was found to be a hoax.

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Posted in: Apple

Google rushing out Android 4 "Ice Cream Sandwich" to counter iPhone 5

Google is reportedly scrambling to deliver the next version of Android for both smartphones and tablets to ensure that iPhone 5 doesn't appear on the market first and without a competitive response from its licensees.

Google shipped Android 2.2 Froyo to its smartphone licensees last year just prior to iOS 4, following up with a 2.3 Gingerbread release in December that incorporated support for NFC tags, improved copy and paste, and the company's WebM video codec.

However, the main thrust for Android in 2011 has been Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which took aim at the success of Apple's iPad. Google rushed Honeycomb to market on the Motorola Xoom shortly before the release of iPad 2, resulting in bad press for the ambitious but not quite finished release.

With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google hopes to fold Honeycomb's "holographic 3D" tablet interface elements into its Gingerbread smartphone release, creating a unified version of Android's APIs that works the same across all devices designed for the new OS version.

Android Head of Engineering Mike Claren referred to the upcoming release as the company’s “most ambitious release to date."

While aimed at a release date at the end of the year, BGR reported today that "it’s looking like the first Ice Cream Sandwich devices could start hitting the ground in as early as October," noting that "we have been told that Google is looking to push up the release of Ice Cream Sandwich devices as Apple’s iPhone 5 is expected in September or October, and the Mountain View-based company doesn’t want potential customers coming out of contracts (especially original DROID owners) and 'drooling over the iPhone 5.'

A wait but no rush for iPhone 5

Apple's iPhone 5, scheduled to appear in the fall (likely late September or early October) alongside the release of iOS 5, is making its appearance later than the historical summer debut of previous iPhone and iOS releases.

That delay hasn't appeared to hurt Apple's smartphone sales, despite the fact that the company's iPhone 4 was first released just over a year ago (making it virtually ancient in the fast moving mobile industry). In part, that's because Apple has increased the number of new carriers selling iPhone 4, including Verizon Wireless in the US in February, greatly broadening the number of users capable of buying the phone.

Apple also released a white model of the iPhone 4 that appears to have attracted upgrades, resulting in a new record of 20.34 million iPhones in its fiscal Q3 2011 quarterly sales.

Still, there appears to be a significant backlog of buyers holding off for Apple's next iPhone release. According to one small survey by Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray, 64 percent of Verizon users plan to buy an iPhone for their next mobile, and 74 percent of those said they are waiting for iPhone 5. Just over half of AT&T users who plan to buy a new iPhone are also waiting for iPhone 5.

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Posted in: Android