The anticipation building around the arrival of the next iPhone is intense. The web is alive with excitement and speculation, with everyone from the average Joe on Twitter, to tech blogs, to multinational media organisations, poring over every detail they can find to try to find any clue about when the next iFruit will fall from the tree. There's also a whole other layer of speculation over whether there’ll be one new iPhone or two.
But while the question of when the new Apple hardware will arrive remains unanswered, T-Mobile USA appears to have crushed any hopes of it arriving at all on its network.
TmoNews.com obtained a copy of an article posted on T-Mobile’s employee intranet, OneVoice, which cites comments made a few days ago by the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Cole Brodman. He is quoted as having said to staff: “We are not going to get the iPhone 5 this year.”
The lack of additional detail here does lend this statement to a degree of interpretation, of course. Did Brodman mean that T-Mobile would not be getting the iPhone 5 in 2011, but that it will arrive in 2012? Could he have meant that there is no iPhone 5 coming from Apple at all this year, and that there will be only a ‘4S’ or ‘4 Plus’ model for now?
BGR notes that they’ve heard persistent reports throughout this year that T-Mobile has been testing iPhone hardware on its network, so it would be an unexpected twist for the carrier to now forego the new iPhone upon its release. However one chooses to interpret Brodman’s comment, though, it seems pretty unambiguous that T-Mobile won’t be selling Apple’s next-generation iPhone this side of the new year.
Still, T-Mobile customers can at least look forward to the “two new smartphones” that the operator plans to launch this holiday season, even if neither of them has a big juicy Apple logo on the back.
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