What would an iPhone launch be without rumors, right? Well right on the coat tails of yesterdays report of Sprint carrying the next generation iPhone, it seems that reports are coming in that T-Mobile will also be the next carrier to sell the iPhone this October.
Following our report yesterday that Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5 will be arriving on the Sprint network, a contact within T-Mobile who claims to have been briefed on the matter has informed us that, in addition to arriving on Sprint at launch, the iPhone 5 will arrive on T-Mobile’s network at launch as well.
The informant, who requested to remain anonymous, went on to claim that the iPhone 5 would also operate at 3G speeds on T-Mobile US network. Current unlocked iPhone 4 units can only operate at at 2G “edge” speeds on T-Mobile’s network, and lack certain network-dependent features, such as Visual Voicemail.
This would mark the first time that all 4 major carriers all sold the phone at the same time. However, we do know that there are close to 1 million iPhones on T-Mobile’s network already, but now they will be official. Which also means for all you T-Mobile iPhone users (including myself), will get 3G instead of Edge speeds on our devices.
This should come as no surprise to anyone as AT&T has announced that they would be purchasing T-Mobile USA, which should become final at the end of the year. T-Mobile was also reportedly testing prototype iPhones on its network, to ensure 3G compatibility with the device. We even reported the T-Mobile started selling Micro-SIMs, which we figured would be for the iPhone. This is just another thing we will have to wait for during the iPhone announcement coming in just a few weeks now.
