Yes, you'll have to wait for the iPhone 5 for high-speed LTE, aka 4G.
(Credit: Apple) Needless to say, the iPhone 5 did not make an appearance this year. Will Strauss, president of wireless chip market research firm Forward Concepts, says there is a very good reason that it was the 4S that showed up in September, 2011 and not the 5.
"They're saving iPhone 5 for the LTE version and that won't be out until next spring," said Strauss, who tracks companies like Qualcomm that supply the chips that power the 3G and 4G technology inside of phones. LTE offers, among other things, higher download and upload speeds compared to current 3G technologies.
Moreover, CEO Tim Cook has said in at least two earnings conference calls (when he was chief operating officer) that the "first generation of LTE chipsets force a lot of design compromises." He said that back in April.
And it's not necessarily Apple's fault, says Strauss, who says the current implementations of LTE in phones like the HTC Thunderbolt are too kludgy for Apple's tastes. "There's no way they could come out with LTE now," Strauss said. The Thunderbolt, for example, has an LTE baseband (modem) chip and a second 3G chip from Qualcomm for the voice functions.
That simply takes up too much room inside a relatively compact smartphone like the iPhone. Other experts agree. "The iPhone 4 PCB [printed circuit board] is already incredibly small, not leaving any room for an extra chip to enable LTE without shrinking the size of the battery (or increasing the thickness of the phone to accommodate both a larger PCB and a big battery)," wrote Anand Shimpi, a chip expert and CEO of Anandtech. His comments were posted in September 2011.
A Qualcomm chip--the MDM9615--will likely appear in the second quarter of next year built on a more advanced chip manufacturing process. The MDM9615 comes in a smaller chip package and is voice enabled, according to Anand.
"Apple (and all other smartphone makers) could [use]...the MDM9615 and have a 'single chip' LTE solution for smartphones...Next year (Q2 to be exact) should be when we can finally get LTE into something iPhone-sized," Anand wrote.
And the move to a more advanced chip manufacturing process will also reduce the power draw for these chips that are notorious battery-life killers. "Phones based on the MDM9615 will likely increase LTE battery life to reasonable levels rather than what we've seen from the first generation of devices," he wrote.
Another big reason to wait for LTE is coverage. There were lot of places in 2011 that LTE didn't reached, according to Strauss. See Verizon's "Check for 4G LTE coverage in my area" page.
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