USA Today is the unlikely source of this week’s major iPhone story, with the US gossipy national newspaper revealing that AT&T has a five year exclusive on the device and that Apple is banned from making a CDMA version throughout that period also.
Verizon, Alltel and Sprint (currently) all use CDMA, so the move is designed to halt their competition with AT&T using the device, and is not a flat out strike against Qualcomm that provides the underlying CDMA technology.
It’s pretty much understood that Apple will have enough of a problem bringing out a UMTS 3G device over the coming months or even years, and it may not have the appetite, design diversity or manufacturing volumes to worry about the loss of the CDMA opportunity.
That doesn’t meant that Sprint will be out of the Apple equation in the long term, since Sprint it slowly moving to an all WIMAX network, but is currently obsessed with introducing new classes of devices that show off the new network to good effect. But for now Sprint has a CDMA network and will have to offer hybrid dual system handsets for some time to come, so if USA Today is right about the CDMA ban, this would prevent Apple targeting Sprint’s network for at least two years.
All of which is bound to make for good business for the suppliers that do make CDMA handsets, which can attempt to copy at least the function, if not the precise look and feel of the iPhone, and Verizon is already talking openly about its iPhone rival, and a Summer launch, probably from LG Electronics.
Meanwhile Taiwan’s DigiTimes says that a second source for the iPhone is being lined up and that it is local manufacturer Quanta, which will ship another iPhone in September, for non-US markets. There is some speculation that already this might be the UMTS 3G version of the phone or one that will work with the data only HSDPA services currently under launch most everywhere.
Contract manufacturer Foxconn which also makes iPods for Apple is understood to be making the first batch of iPhones for the US launch.
AT&T also told US reporters this week that the iPhone still has a few surprises and that it would ship with some hot applications that have yet to be revealed, one of which is from Google, hinting they would be so radical that the high price of the device would no longer be a problem.