Why there won’t be a 3G iPhone before the end of the year
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
Apple just recently announced the iPhone SDK including a roadmap for the next iPhone firmware functionality. Interestingly, Apple will be adopting ActiveSync for over-the-air synchronization with Exchange and compatible servers (Zimbra?). The firmware update will also include enterprise WPA2 and VPN support. The update is announced for June (read, the end of the month).
The new feature set will most likely make people wonder if there might be a hardware revision waiting as well. Everybody is talking about a 3G (HSxPA) version of the iPhone, and frankly, this would be great for a few geeks and early adopters.
My opinion though is, that Apple won’t change the hardware till late 2008 and will be waiting to introduce new hardware revisions ready for the holiday season. There might be an announcement for new hardware on WWDC, though I don’t expect the new iPhone to come out before the end of the year.
The iPhone can absolutely deliver the new features that have been announced for firmware revision 2.0 without a hardware upgrade. Push e-mail and synching technology does perfectly work over EDGE - it might as well work better over EDGE!
3G does consume a lot of power compared to EDGE and it doesn’t really deliver a positive impact on the application anyway. Furthermore, 3G availability is still very spotty across the world (and incompatible too, USA WCDMA 2100MHz vs. Europe&Asia 1900MHz). Also, bear in mind that 3G network deployments require a much denser network of cell towers and thus make it economically unfeasible to cover rural areas. If you’re a road warrior, you specifically want to be connected where everybody else isn’t. You don’t need great coverage in cities where you can find a WI-FI hotspot at every street corner and bandwidth is all over the place anyway. You want reliable coverage where everybody else would be disconnected.
The lower latency and higher bandwidth available with 3G is not mandatory for push e-mail. E-mail messages are relatively small and can be delivered over EDGE at least as well as over 3G. E-mail messages aren’t real time media streams.
EDGE’s added benefit over 3G is power consumption. Since push e-mail will require the radio to be always on, this is a very important thing to think about. The higher speeds available with 3G won’t justify the higher power consumption. You can see, this makes a lot of sense when you compare Apple to its competition. How come RIM, the biggest manufacturer of push e-mail devices yet, is still delivering most new devices without 3G? They probably recognized that 3G is just a power hog and does not at all deliver any benefits in a push e-mail and OTA synching scenarios.
Given these premises, it is most likely Apple will stick some more time to it’s EDGE powered iPhone. The market currently wants push e-mail, OTA synching, enterprise WI-FI and other features, that all do not require 3G at the moment. It is much more profitable to refine the iPhone’s software instead of launching a new product. The longer Apple sticks with the first generation iPhone, the bigger the profit margins will get. As long as the broad public doesn’t request technical features (i.e. the addition of 3G), but just asks for new applications and software implementable features, Apple will definitively be better off to serve the market with the current iPhone hardware.
Maybe, looking forward towards the end of the year, Apple could be delivering a 3G iPhone introducing new application scenarios. Currently, there are still no widely adopted usage patterns that would require 3G. Your local geek might say, of course there are applications scenarios that require 3G, though listening to streaming web radio and video on the go is not something that the broad public is yet looking for.
The market that requires 3G on the move, has just not been invented yet.
UPDATE: The new beta firmware seems to work with the latest version of Zimbra 5.0, when using a Zimbra Network Edition account with ActiveSync support enabled.