iPhone 4GB and 8GB, Coming in January?

[Macula]

Apple will need to outdo itself in matters of Quality Assurance and quality of materials/assembly. Cell phones lead tough lives! They fall and crash on the floor, they get wet, scratched and pressed, they go through thousands of keystrokes... Phones are not iPods -- they are heavy duty tools for most busy people in big, rough cities.

Apple, I hope, will spare us Macbook-type defects, scratch-prone materials, flickering screens, whines and the like. True, most cell phones in the market suck in the quality department, anyway. But Apple will have more to lose than your average phone maker if quality does not turn out to be highly consistent.

It's up to them: They really have the potential to release the best phone ever.

 

[Max Payne]

It's too cheap to be a mobile phone. I don't believe it.

All the Nokia N series are more expensive than $249.

 

[kenzbud]

Ok, so it the price points are correct, this means that an iPhone will cost the same as an iPod nano of the same size. That doesn't sound right, which means Apple will have to either, 1- increase the space on the nano, or 2- lower the price on the nano. We all know apple will never lower the price, so this means there's an iPod nano update in the works too!

A 4GB is currently $199 and a 8 GB is $249
Rumor says 4GB $249 & 8GB $449
That doesn't sound like the same price for comparable models.

And why do you say Apple will never lower the price of a iPod. They just lowered the price $50 when they released the latest 30GB & 80GB.

 

[jholzner]

An unlocked phone will be great for GSM providers. You just slip in the SIM card and the phone activates.

So if they sell this thing unlocked I can just pull the sim card out of my Razr (I'm with cingular) and pop it into the iPhone and I'll be up and running?

 

[tehdee]

i would love it if apple could pull this off.

But forget about CDMA, I didn't think anyone but the farmers out in the scrub used CDMA and even they gave that up ages ago when satellite phones became cheap.

My mind still boggles that your telcos can dictate access to the phone's features. You shouldn't need to worry about what provider you use when you consider which phone. Sure some providers may get exclusive deals but if a phone is offered by multiple providers it should have access to all the features that it would have if it were unlocked.

alot of the phones sold by rogers in canada, and cingular in the U.S. are neutered. for example, the nokia e61 sold in europe had wifi, while at the north american carriers's request, they had the wi-fi feature removed. why? so they could make more money on data. wifi would be a definite advatage over bberries and moto qs and moto e's being sold currently in N.A.

it will be interesting to see how this phone will be marketed...

if the phone is 'unlocked', we are going to see alot of carriers not offering support for technical issues. in europe, and the middle east, people buy phones from thirs party retailers; this is in stark contrast to north america, where most phones are bought from the provider directly, and are usually bundled into a contract...

someone else brought up 3G. GSM carriers in north america are just beginning to roll out 3G (3.5G actually) on a national level. what kind of specs are we going to see? quad band is a given, but will it be North American 3G (UMTS 850/1900) or European Spec (UMTS 1900/2100) [NOTE: my knowloedge of this is a bit patchy, so someone please correct me if im wrong)... there is a difference between european and north american 'Third Generation'. Or will it be 2G with plain jane 850/900/1800/1900? that'd be kind of lame...

 

[zimtheinvader]

I agree they are far too cheap in the context of buying an "unlocked" phone.

If either is a "smart-phone" I would expect pricing to be comparable to a Treo, (its nearest competitor), which would put it closer to $6-800 street retail. Even if these prices include contracts, they're still pretty low for Apple. And what about touch-screen? The MotoQ takes a huge performance hit in Productivity due to lack of touch-screen, (and subsequent lack of Excel, Word, ect. functionality)

Plus, the low price makes me lose hope that even the high-end is a smart-phone, remember Apple's last Pda? Those things were the price of a freakin Tablet-PC today! $449 is high for an ipod, but not for a Razr, not for a Razr+ipod, but it seems a little rediculous for a "mini-osx/newton" type box! But go ahead, suprize us Apple, and revolutionize the smartphone market! Its time to nail Palm OS5's coffin closed!

 

[prady16]

I love the fact that it will be available with all providers!

 

[trogdor!]

It's too cheap to be a mobile phone. I don't believe it.

All the Nokia N series are more expensive than $249.

Yah, I want to see something that compares to the N-95. Built in GPS, WIFI, the works.

 

[zimtheinvader]

Also re: the post above, the HTC-6700 has everything including Wifi that can be simultaneously enabled with the latest updates, keyboard, touchscreen, multi-tasking. Imho Apple would do best to make something GSM/CDMA compliant similar to this model, but without the signal-strength issues or PPC5 flakiness...

 

[Misplaced Mage]

Come on Phone Shuffle. One that you can hang around your neck and is very small.

Brilliant! And when you call someone, it randomly selects a number from your phonebook!

 

[LastZion]

Yeah I am not a huge fan of slide out keyboard... but everything else sounds perfect!

 

[twoodcc]

well i hope all is true. if so, looks like i gotta save up some money

 

[LastZion]

Brilliant! And when you call someone, it randomly selects a number from your phonebook!

hill air e us. Nice one!

 

[Misplaced Mage]

Agreed. A new cell phone every two years is nice, but wouldn't it just be simpler if the one you bought lasted 3 or 4 (or more) years instead without breaking or being so useless you hope the next phone will be better?

It's the usual mobile device design conundrum: do you build it cheap so you can sell it at a lower price and thus sell more of them, or build it to be almost indestructible and increase the cost and decrease the number of willing buyers? The happy medium is usually to design the device to last about as long as the typical user will use it before replacing it with a better/faster/smaller/sexier unit and not due to breakage.

The trick, of course, is to determine the abuse the "typical user" will subject the device to over the course of its lifetime.

 

[aiongiant]

sounds so sweet! time to save up lalala =)

 

[rtharper]

It's the usual mobile device design conundrum: do you build it cheap so you can sell it at a lower price and thus sell more of them, or build it to be almost indestructible and increase the cost and decrease the number of willing buyers? The happy medium is usually to design the device to last about as long as the typical user will use it before replacing it with a better/faster/smaller/sexier unit and not due to breakage.

The trick, of course, is to determine the abuse the "typical user" will subject the device to over the course of its lifetime.

In this, case, though, I think it's a given that people will be willing to pay a premium for a lot of features/durability/etc. And I've been trhougha few a phones in the past few years (I punish mine quite a bit) and to be honest, all I want out of any of them is messaging, phone book (address optional unless smart phone), and the ability to call. If i can also have my addresses and a qwerty keyboard that's perfect. I would have no reason to upgrade if that was the case.

 

[SBik2]

So if they sell this thing unlocked I can just pull the sim card out of my Razr (I'm with cingular) and pop it into the iPhone and I'll be up and running?

Yes for calling.. Then you might have to configure the Media Net settings and MMS settings i think.

The SIM stores your number, and your other information

 

[seh80]

I REALLY hope this is true. I'm off contract with Tmobile now and am month to month, and need a new phone. I got a SE K790a (which was awesome) one week ago, put it on ebay this morning and it sold within two hours so now I have the cash and am so ready. Even if there is no phone, at least I have funds to get some other tempting MWSF goodie should there be one!

 

[lOUDsCREAMEr]

some a hole trying to steal the spotlight,,,
what a wild guess/common sense b sht

 

[Bengt77]

I love the fact that it will be available with all providers!

Hey, don't go all out here. This is MacRumors, and since this whole iPhone thing is still nothing more than a (persistent, but still) rumor that means there is no fact here whatsoever. Still, it's funny, reading the word fact in a thread like this.

 

[rtharper]

Hey, don't go all out here. This is MacRumors, and since this whole iPhone thing is still nothing more than a (persistent, but still) rumor that means there is no fact here whatsoever. Still, it's funny, reading the word fact in a thread like this.

Agreed. My guess is that there will definitely be a GSM world phone. That captures roughly 1/3 of the US market, and all of the European market (not sure about Asia, am pretty sure they use CDMA...).

I wouldn't hold my breath for a CDMA model, though...

 

[Latisha]

The best thing they could do, imo, is Apple-ize the way the contracts are dealt with. Right now, that is, in my opinion, the clunkiest and most confusing part of having a cell phone: the stuff having to do with paying for your service, different payment plans, etc. I think Apple could do to that what they did to online music downloads.

 

[mr_matalino]

Nothing about calendar syncing or WiFi?

 

[rtharper]

Nothing about calendar syncing or WiFi?

I think calendar syncing is sort of implied. It'd be a rather major oversight to not have it. I'm not sure how widespread the wi-fi cell phone services are yet, anyone know of any that work in any country? Tests were extremely successful, I hear, by Motorola using a technology they have kept as a trade secret to transfer calls between wi-fi and cells. If you mean wi-fi for internet access, etc, I don't think anyone has any idea. Not even Kevin Rose =p

 

[leorou]

Guys, maybe the iPhone is a flip-phone...did anybody heard the diggnation 0074 (2006-11-30) audio? Kevin Rose said "...and i believe touch-screen in the outside...", and in my opinion that implies a flip-phone. I think that Steve couldn't think a phone without a camera, nowadays is a standard req. for a mobile phone. And about the "...slide out keyboard...", why? I read that Apple discovered a way of having a touch-screen with keyboard capabilities, please Apple, use it!. Well, that's it.

Ohh, i'm too in the list of having one! Yeahhh

Sorry 'bout my english, i'm from Uruguay, Latin America

Cheers!