Okay. **sighs** I know this rumour has been going around for ever and ever, and frankly I have always thought of this as wishful thinking, from AT&T users. This is not really a big deal to us Canadians, but over the past few months, there has been more and more speculation that Apple will indeed release a CDMA version of the iPhone.
Peter Burrows, of Busniessweek.com speculates that Apple will be announcing the new iPhone shortly after CES 2011. Here’s an excerpt from his article:
Apple’s introduction of an iPhone for use on Verizon’s network will come sometime after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, according to a person familiar with Apple’s plans who is not authorized to discuss them publicly. Estimates from industry analysts of the resulting number of defections to Verizon from AT&T range from 1 million to 6 million. John Hodulik, an analyst at UBS Securities (UBS), comes in somewhere in the middle. He predicts that AT&T will sell 8.8 million iPhones in 2011, down from 15.6 million in 2010. Of the 13.3 million Hodulik expects Verizon to sell in 2011, about 2.3 million will be to AT&T refugees, he predicts. An additional 10 million will be current Verizon subscribers who upgrade from other devices, and the rest will come from other carriers.
So, here’s my opinion. Apple’s product announcement for earlier in the new year will most likely be the iPad 2. Unless Steve throws us a “one more thing”, I don’t think we’ll see an iPhone announcement until later in the spring. It has been this way four years in a row, now, and I don’t see that changing. iPhone 5 (or whatever they call it) will probably be released in June of 2011, and if there is to be a CDMA iPhone, it probably won’t be released until then.
