iPhone 4G Chipsets Coming In 2012? [Wireless Insiders Say That Apple-Friendly 4G LTE Chipsets Coming Next Year, Will The iPhone 6 Have 4G?]

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A few days ago, I told you about how during their quarterly earnings call, Apple COO (and interim CEO) Tim Cook dismissed outright the possibility of the next iPhone having 4G LTE connectivity. Cook cited what bloggers like myself have been saying forever, which is that the current-gen of 4G LTE chipsets are too big for Apple to include in their slim & slender iPhones. Now, industry insiders are reporting that we may see Apple-friendly 4G chipsets in early 2012.

Forbes talked to Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, an analyst group. Strauss told that outlet:

[Those chips won't appear in handsets until next year.] They’re right that there’s nothing out there that fits the bill, and likely nothing will until the fourth quarter of this year.

Everybody seems to believe that Apple will go with the just announced Qualcomm MDM9615 chipsets, a bimodal 3G/4G chipset. As MacRumors pointed out in their piece on this, current 4G phones from other manufacturers are including both a 3G and 4G radio, as bimodal radios aren’t available yet. And, that matters. I just reviewed the HTC Thunderbolt (Verizon) and am currently reviewing the HTC EVO Shift 4G (Sprint). Both are hefty phones, most likely due to the 4G radio. As readers are aware, Apple is all about having each year’s iPhone be smaller and thinner than last year’s.

Apple is also an international company – the iPhone is sold all over the world. They’d be putting the extra cost and complexity into a 4G iPhone when Verizon is really the only carrier in the world with a real world LTE network. Yes, AT&T has one coming. Yes, the Scandinavian countries have a LTE network, but the rest of the world has been in no rush to build a 4G LTE network. Despite what the Sprint and Verizon fanboys say – 4G really isn’t widespread when you look at it on a global scale.

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