3G iPhone: tri-band HSDPA 850/1900/2100MHz leak news!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 07 June 2008 09:04

Your IT - Mobility

Engadget has had details from the 3G iPhone firmware leaked which seem to confirm a tri-band HSDPA chips are within for 850, 1900 and 2100MHz. It’s great news for AT&T, Rogers and Telstra, but not so good news for Vodafone, Optus and other 900MHz HSDPA carriers?

Well, with 3 sleeps to go before the TRUTH about the 3G iPhone is revealed by a proud Steve Jobs, any last minute rumours are still just that – plain ol’, good ol’ rumours.

UPDATE: Looks like these details were correct, as the iPhone 3G has now launched! Full details here.

Original story follows:

BUT... the latest from Engadget is one of the juiciest yet, seeming to confirm that the 3G iPhone will have quad-band GSM (2G/2.5G), UMTS (3G), tri-band HSDPA (3.5) and A-GPS... but perhaps not real GPS, which could come as a massive disappointment to some, if true.

As Engadget points out, we ALL know that a 3G iPhone was coming at some point – Steve Jobs said so himself at the January Macworld 2007 pre-launch of today’s 2G iPhone.

There have been numerous leaks from telco executives as well, including AT&T’s CEO, who also said that 3G would be coming soon, and as Apple’s first telco partner, he’d certainly be in a position to know.

Given the fact that a 3G iPhone has effectively been a given for some time, this, to me, is clear evidence why there was a drop off in iPhone sales earlier this year. Some pundits claimed it was because the iPhone was losing its lustre, but what kind of crazy person would truly want to buy a 2G iPhone when the 3G iPhone was just around the corner – except for someone like the foxy Alexander Wolfe?

So, it’s with quite a bit of excitement, at least for those who have wanted a 3G iPhone on Australia’s dominant telco, Telstra, whose 3.5G network is on the 850MHz HSDPA band, that Engadget’s news appears to confirm this absolutely.

Indeed, some rumour mongers I’ve spoken to in Australia assuring me that Telstra has been testing up to fifty 3G iPhones in Melbourne for some time now, although Telstra refuses to confirm or deny this.

Engadget says that they “have it from a reliable source that a version of the 3G iPhone's firmware has been released -- possibly for carrier partners currently field-testing the device -- and has since been dissected.”

Of course they say that “nothing is ever guaranteed”, but they do think that they “got more than enough information the low-level hardware and drivers that run the device to make some informed conclusions about what we can expect: quad-band GSM support (as we currently have), A-GPS (as we'd already gotten from another source), and tri-band UMTS / HSDPA -- which would make the new iPhone(s) 3G-capable in just about every market in the world.”

Please read on to page 2 for the juicy hardware breakdown details – and why this could be bad, bad news for some Optus and Vodafone 3G iPhone customers if true.