The ongoing announcements about the possibility of an iPhone 5 being released this summer on the AT&T network just became more confusing thanks to a comment made from an unlikely source: an AT&T representative. The rep announced May 4 that he was told by an Apple exec that there would “officially” be no iPhone 5 this summer. The announcement of the announcement of the second-hand declaration was not confirmed by Apple, but since when did they ever confirm or deny anything? This whole new bit of information was reported on MacRumors.
A release of “later this year” is all the unnamed AT&T would give as a date for the iPhone 5′s arrival. If this holds true, it would be a sea change for Apple, who traditionally releases in the summer every year. Devindra Hardawar of VentureBeat tends to believe this hearsay announcement, because she personally believes a Fall release would work well for Apple, for a number of reasons.
She points out the fact that LTE 4G mobile technologies are still new, but getting better and better all the time, developing quickly, and that a delayed release could be due to Apple trying to get LTE chips in the iPhone 5′s handsets. Also, she points out, just imagine the millions of devote Apple customers who are used to Apple’s release cycle. This would create even more anticipation moving into the early holiday season.
And the release of the iPad 3 could be a near-simultaneous release with the iPhone 5, since they will both probably run on the iOS 5 operating system, which is also rumored for this fall. An iPhone 5 and iPad 3 concurrent release, and right in time for the holiday season, would no doubt also help Apple pull sales from other smartphone and tablet manufacturers launching around the same time.
In the ongoing iPhone 5 “announcement” saga, we will just have to wait to see when it will hit the streets. However, as mentioned earlier, it would be very out of character for Apple to release later than June or July, August at the latest.
