macnn/electronista
12/27/2007, 9:20am, EST
Thursday, December 27thTouchscreen deal hints at 3G iPhone timing
Shipments of touchscreen panels may indicate the timing of Apple's planned 3G iPhone. The Taiwanese newspaper Economic Daily News cites unspecified sources in the display industry, who say that local company Innolux will begin shipping touchscreens to Apple in the second quarter of 2008. If true, this would be just in time to build new iPhones for a mid-summer launch; the first phones were released on June 29th of this year, and have so far relied mainly on panels from Wintek.
Apple has yet to set a formal schedule for the 3G iPhone's debut other than 2008, a timeframe which was first put forward by AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. Some people and publications have speculated that the first word of a new iPhone could come at next month's Macworld Expo, similarly to the original product, but it is expected that no devices will ship until several months later.
EDN also mentions that Innolux will officially start shipping LCDs for Nokia in the first quarter of the year, while yet more anonymous sources say that handset panels will go out to Samsung "soon."
Filed under: iPhone, gadgets, Apple
Other story tags: Samsung, Nokia, cellphones
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Then again, they can always let rumors or hints drop to draw attention and headlines to their event.
Personally, I'll only be interested when the phone is 3G, and has a bunch more space, but I'm in the minority.
And didn't people notice the O2 guy who talked about the 3G phone coming 'late in 2008'?
He wants more space on the device. He's not saying "I'm buying a blackberry because it's got more space!". There's no comparative remark in there.
I have a 60GB 5G iPod (no video) that's full. To me, the point of an iPod is it allows me to take my entire colloection of music, podcasts, audio books, etc, with me wherever I go.
I have a 'free' cell phone. I see no point in buying an iPhone for it's iPod capabilities, since it would be, to me, a limited iPod, at the cost of a 'full-sized' iPod. So I would still be carrying around my iPod and my phone, and be poorer because of it.
So, for those of us who want a real iPod replacement (not just a iPod nano replacement), the iPhone doesn't fit the bill.