News

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore thinks Apple should and will embrace the mid-range/pre-paid mobile phone market in 2011. Two-thirds of the 1.5 billion mobile customers worldwide are pre-paid users, and Whitmore believes Apple will try to reach these customers by releasing an unlocked iPhone priced between $300 and $500. Perhaps the iPhone 4S?

“With Nokia and RIMM struggling,” Whitmore said, “the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid range smart-phone market to dramatically expand its market share.”

Whitmore predicts that an affordable iPhone priced around $349 will not negatively impact profitability, and will help give Apple a bigger share of the $70 billion worldwide market.

Forget the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5, how about the iPhone 6? The Apple/Samsung catfight has made things awkward for the two companies, and may cause Apple to move to its orders for A6 processors to Taiwan.

The iPhone's A5 chips are currently made in Korea, the latest battleground for Apple's lawsuit against Samsung. Apple alleges that Samsung's Galaxy S and other mobile devices "blatantly” copy its technologies and designs.

A T-Mobile spokesperson told 9to5Mac they are carrying more than a million unlocked iPhones on their network. When asked how, the spokesman said people with older iPhone devices had “taken the scissors” to their T-Mobile SIM cards. T-Mobile doesn't offer MicroSiM cards for iPhones, so people had to create their own. Owners of the new unlocked iPhone 4 can't access T-Mobile’s 3G or 4G data speeds, so they will probably want to stick with AT&T.

Patent number 7,966,578 could change the face of the mobile device market. The newly approved iPhone patent filed by Apple over three-years ago is for "[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display."

Depending on how the patent is interpreted, it could give Apple control over all capacitive screen and multitouch interface devices. Several patent experts warned that if it's not invalidated, it could allow Apple to bully other smartphone manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung and Motorolo.

“Unless this patent is invalidated or at least narrowed, it will be a potential impediment to innovation until December 2027,” patent expert Florian Muller told Macworld. “I don’t see any innovative achievement disclosed in that patent document that would justify a monopoly of that breadth and duration. Apple could use it in various ways throughout that period, including some that would be highly undesirable.”

The most likely "undesirable" method would be demanding high licensing fees from competitors.

The next generation iPhone rumors are steadily increasing while orders for the iPhone 4 are decreasing.

Tech blogs have the iPhone 5 arriving this August, September, November and not at all. There are rumors that Apple's next phone will be the iPhone 4S, an iPhone 5 with new case, and everything in-between, but the closest report that I've seen that even supports a next generation device being released in the near future, comes from the DigiTimes.

The Times reports that Taiwan-based PCB companies are lowering quotes for Apple orders.

"Despite the third quarter being a traditional peak season for the consumer electronics industry, Taiwan-based PCB suppliers have cut quotes for the quarter by 10% on average for their orders placed by Apple, according to industry sources."