Image via CrunchBase
Today is the big day: Apple, it is widely assumed, will be debuting a new smartphone at a San Francisco event to an eager market. Par the course, rumors have been flying about what features the device--let’s call it, oh I don’t know, the iPhone 5--will sport. NFC (near field communication) is in the running; so is 4G LTE. Indeed, a newspaper in South Korea has reported that Samsung is poised to sue Apple in expectation that it infringed on its LTE patents.
The real story, though, is not the probable next chapter in the ongoing legal war between Apple and Samsung, or even if Apple will give Google competition for Google Wallet with NFC. Rather it is whether those talks China Mobile and Apple reportedly held earlier this year came to anything.
If they did one of the features in the iPhone 5 will be support for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA service. That, says Rob Walch, host of Today in iOS, is the flavor of LTE that really matters with today’s launch. “There are a lot of permutation of LTE, around 36. Will Apple be supporting China Mobile’s? I think it will.”
Apple is already in China, of course, via China Unicom and China Telecom. China Mobile is the largest carrier, though, and the one that could possibly help Apple make inroads in the market against Samsung—and possibly dethrone it from its perch as king of the world’s smartphones.
Certainly it would be an exciting new chapter in the smartphone wars, but at least one report suggests stepped up competition in the China market not going to unfold just yet.
Trefis says that lagging development of a Qualcomm chipset that can support China Mobile’s homegrown 3G network means a partnership between the two will not happen in the near term.
Qualcomm has had ongoing 28nm supply chain problems, Trefis says. “The MDM 9615 chipset that supports TD-SCDMA as well as many LTE networks may have also been impacted by the shortage, forcing Apple to delay a China Mobile launch until the issues have been sorted out. “
