4G iPhone’s Chip Won’t Come In Until Early 2012

Apple can introduce an iPhone 5 any time — but a 4G handset won’t arrive before next year.Wholesale Battery

Rumor has it the next-generation iPhone won’t arrive until September. If so, it won’t offer the crazy fast data speeds promised by next-generation 4G wireless  networks.Wholesale Computers

That’s because access to the turbo-charged networks that make Verizon’s Thunderbolt handset crazy fast require a combination of chips Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook said Wednesday Apple won’t use.LASER POINTERS

In response to a question from Morgan Stanley analyt Katy Huberty on Apple’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday, Apple’s Cook said today’s 4G chips — which rely on a wireless technology dubbed Long Term Evolution (LTE) — don’t meet Apple’s needs.smart car accessories

“The first generation of LTE chip-sets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make,” Cook says. Separately, Cook declined to talk about the timeline for introducing a new iPhone. “We never comment on unannounced products,” Cook said.wholesale accessories electronics store

Those chips won’t appear in handsets until next year, says Will Strauss, president of wireless chip tracker Forward Concepts. “They’re right that there’s nothing out there that fits the bill, and likely nothing will until the fourth quarter of this year,” wholesale baby monitor Strauss says when asked about Cook’s remarks.

The only 4G handset on the market in the United States, Verizon’s Thunderbolt, currently relies on a pair of chips to work. One chip, from Samsung, communicates with Verizon’s 4G networks, allowing the handset to achieve blazing data speeds of between 5 and 20 MBPS. Another chip, from Qualcomm, lets the handset talk to Verizon’s 3G network.

That two chip solution is needed because Verizon’s 4G network isn’t widespread enough for the carriers to offer handsets that rely on 4G alone, Strauss explains. The solution: a new generation of chips that combine support for 4G and 3G on a single chip, allowing handset makers to offer slim handsets that don’t gobble up battery life.

Chipmakers such as Qualcomm,, ST Ericcson, and Intel won’t begin offering customers samples of such chips until late this year. And those chips won’t begin appearing in handsets until next year, Strauss predicts.  As a result, there won’t be a 4G iPhone any earlier than that.