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One very obvious thing missing from last year's Apple iPhone was 3G support. If you wanted high-speed internet access when you weren't near a WiFi hotspot, then you needed to rely on a GPRS or EDGE connection. Very often subscribers were stuck with dial-up modem speeds on a device that really needed a much faster internet connection.

Apple's excuse for the lack of 3G was that it drained the battery too quickly, but in reality the problem was more likely to be that the iPhone was designed for the US AT&T/Cingular network where 3G availability was not great, and not for Europe where 3G coverage is very much better.

Several rumours and reports indicate that Apple may well be about to rectify the lack of 3G in the iPhone with a new model. A recent report in the UK's Times newspaper indicates that the 3G iPhone will be due for a launch in June, and carriers who hold existing iPhone stock are slashing prices in order to move inventory. And by all indications, major European carriers are sitting on top of hundreds of thousands of iPhones which are likely to become obsolete pretty quickly.

Not only do carriers have to worry about unsold stock, but there's also the problem of how to deal with upgrades. Many iPhone customers will want to upgrade their handsets while still within their contracts.. contracts which tent to be quite long for the iPhone. Customers will not want to wait until their contract expires to get an upgrade.

Although a replacement for the iPhone is inevitable, there is very little information on what the "iPhone II" will look like. Some analysts have said that it will be radically different, but it must surely be a touchscreen device that retains the excellent iPhone interface that it already has. As the saying goes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and in this case we suspect that the iPhone II will build on all the strengths of the original model while addressing some of the many weaknesses.

Labels: 3G, iPhone