Verizon may gobble up Diet iPhone

New iStuff would be useless outside US, though

By Bill Ray, 28th April 2009

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Apple is close to an agreement with Verizon Wireless to launch two new Apple products this year: a cut-down iPhone and a larger device dubbed a "media pad" - although they may not be much use to anyone outside the US.

According to Business Week, the story emanates from two sources identified as "familiar with the matter", and is backed up with an assertion that the Verizon CEO admitted speaking to Steve Jobs on the subject. But any devices launched by Verizon would need to support CDMA technology - making them incompatible with most of the rest of the world.

There aren't a lot of details on the products themselves: one is apparently an "iPhone lite", while the other is a larger device with a full face touch-screen and dubbed a "media pad". One person, who has apparently seen the media pad, reports: "We are talking about a device where people will say, 'Damn, why didn't we do this?' Apple is probably going to define the damn category."

One or two people have, of course, thought of media pads before, but Apple is extremely good at bundling up and branding old ideas in clever ways.

But switching to CDMA would be expensive, and would leave Apple with a product only really suited to the North American market, which isn't a good fit with the company's aspirations. Business Week notes that these negotiations could simply be a lever to extract more money, and control, out of AT&T as the exclusive deal for the iPhone comes to an end. ®

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Posted Friday 1st May 2009 15:39 GMT

Anonymous Coward

CDMA

I'm not sure that it would be such an expensive exercise to develop for "CDMA". The RF/baseband chipsets are mature, and close ties between the IC manufacturers and handset makers would quickly resolve design issues.

Anyway, both 3G standards are very similar, coming in large part from Qualcomm's CDMA patents, the basic technology for which goes back to radar research from decades ago:

1) UMTS (including HSPA extensions), which is common in Europe and some of Asia, is a 3GPP standard based on W-CDMA, which was originally specified by Docomo.

2) CDMA2000 (including EVDO extensions), which is common in the US and bits of Asia, is a 3GPP2 standard developed directly by Qualcomm.

The more interesting question is when we can expect devices based on 3GPP LTE, which is a big change in terms of the physical layer technology (OFDMA / SC-FDMA based).

LTE has the support of virtually every major player these days (with the exception of those firmly in the WiMax camp, which it could be argued will end up addressing a rather different market anyway).