June 12, 2008

The very first complaints about the original iPhone when Apple launched it last year was that it ran on AT&T's EDGE network--the complaint was twofold: It was exclusive to AT&T and it only ran on EDGE. While the AT&T exclusivity will persist with the iPhone's second coming, Apple has upgraded the phone's radios to include 3G, which means a faster mobile internet.

The 3G iPhone also boasts a GPS chip that many believe is based on Broadcom technology. The iPhone will offer at least one mobile social networking service, loopt, for free. The service allows users to determine the locations of their friends--who also must be loopt users.  

After discussions with Apple's vendor partners, UBS Research believes that Apple aims to sell between 10 million and 15 million 3G iPhones. GigaOM combined these figures with others to determine that Apple could make about $5.98 billion on the 3G iPhone and as much as $7 billion. Those figures are for the hardware alone--they don't account for the applications Apple will begin selling over iTunes.

While much of the industry is focused on the newest iPhone, Caroline Gabriel has taken a look at the budding standards tug-of-war between WiFi, UWB and WirelessHD for the IEEE's 60 GHz standards.

Last week we asked our readers which mobile social network would dominate the mobile platform in the coming years: a full 64 percent said Facebook would, while 7 percent predicted LinkedIn would be the victor. MySpace got zero votes as did loopt. About 29 percent of readers voted for a mobile social network that was not listed in our choices--or one that has yet to launch. This week's poll: Do you use mobile banking services? If so, how often: everyday, once a week, once a month, only a few times a year or not at all.