Analysts are projecting iPhone growth will add at least 1 Million new subscribers to AT&T by Q4 ‘07, with an additional 3.5 Million added by late next year. Amazing that a phone could spark such growth!
In a report to clients on Thursday, equity research analyst Mike McCormack said his latest model has the inaugural Apple handset contributing 915,000 new subscribers to AT&T’s wireless network during the second half of this year, with an additional 3.5 million likely to follow in 2008.
McCormack’s latest calculations represent an approximate 17 percent increase to his previous estimate of 5.4 million new subscribers in 2007, and a 76 percent increase to his 2008 estimate of 4.6 million newcomers. The iPhone should also help curb AT&T’s churn (or loss of subscribers) during the same time frames, the analyst said.
This is a very professional video even if it is faux. I like it better than the real ads made by TBWA\Chiat\Day. The producer of this video even created a website for it. Check it out.
John Markoff of NYT waxes philosophical on the argument over hardware buttons vs. bitmap screen in his latest editorial.
The downside is that typing is done by pecking on the screen with thumbs or fingers, something hardly anyone outside of Apple has experienced yet. “The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” said Bill Moggeridge, a founder of Ideo, an industrial design company in Palo Alto, Calif. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”
MacRumors has confirmed one small but significant tidbit about the June 29 iPhone launch. The 6:00pm launch is local time, not nationwide. What does that mean, you ask? It means that folks on the east coast will be getting their iPhones a full three hours before west coasters! Na na nah nah na nahhhhhhh!
While Steve Jobs gave us an exact time (6 p.m.) to line up for buy an iPhone, he didn’t go into many details.
As it turns out, the iPhone will be sold on June 29th at 6 p.m. local time — so East Coasters will get a full 3 hour head start over their West Coast counter parts.
A memo sent by AT&T confirmed this today:
The iPhone will go on sale on at AT&T retail stores June 29 at 6 p.m. local time in each market.
AppleInsider is reporting via a tipster that AT&T will not be offering the iPhone to its Business Account customers. If you fall into that camp, you’ll need to purchase your unit through individual contracts.
I can hear the collective screams of biz users as loud as the guy from the Paris Hilton press conference. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
European Operators are hot happy with the fruity company from Cupertino. Apparently Apple is not playing friendly with its iPhone distribution plans for the EU market.
“Operators consistently told us, not for attribution, of course, that they had spoken to Apple and found the company ‘unbelievably arrogant’, making demands that ’simply cannot be justified no matter how hot the product is’,” Avi Greengart, a principal analyst at Current Analysis, wrote in an advisory on Monday.
“Several [operators] were adamant that they will never offer the iPhone.”
File this under the crazy claims category. A website called Pure Mobile is peddling what it alleges to be unlocked iPhones, soon to be available to anyone with a sustainable credit card. Now, I don’t know whether this is lame attempt to drive traffic to their site or if (and that’s a big IF) they’ve somehow managed to cheat the system by acquiring pre-locked iPhone units. Whatever the case may be, I’ll be getting my hands on one the old fashioned way – by stealing purchasing one through AT&T.
Gizmodo reports that AT&T is boosting the bandwidth available to internet users on its EDGE mobile data network. The operation, dubbed “Fine Edge,” has been a 6 week program and is scheduled to complete on June 15th. The previous minimum speed per tower was 40 kbps (that’s kilobits per seconds), the upgrade bumps it up to 80 kbps, with a maximum probable value of 200kbps. It’s still not quick, but hopefully enough that your average web page will take just a few seconds to render instead of half a minute.
