Gadget Reviews, Product News, Electronic Gadgets

September vs. October iPhone 5 Launch Debate And The Loyalty Of iPhone Fans

Read Charles Moore’s round-up of the latest rumors surrounding the release month of the iPhone 5, as well as some insight into the loyalty of iPhone users.
This week, the iPhone 5 scuttlebutt seems to be moving closer to a general consensus, although there’s still plenty of dissonance, particularly regarding the speculative release date. The good news is that most speculators now seem to be pretty much in agreement agree that there will be an iPhone 5 coming in the next few weeks, with the largest school of thought deducing September (which is now next month), but some votes for October as well.
Appleinsider’s Neil Hughes reports that Sterne Agee analyst and Apple-watcher Shaw Wu is hearing from his supply-chain sources that the fifth-generation iPhone, while it’s still unlikely to include 4G-LTE high-speed wireless data connectivity, “could be a bigger upgrade than we expected,” and that for example will have a “slightly larger” display than the iPhone 4′s 3.5-incher along with the A5 processor used in the iPad 2, packed into a similar form factor enclosure similar in size to the iPhone 4 but perhaps slightly thinner.
Wall Street Journal AllThingsD columnist John Paczkowski stirred the pot this week declaring that rumors claiming the iPhone 5 will debut in late September are mistaken, and that it will be October instead, citing unnamed sources “with knowledge of the situation.”
Not so says Charles Arthur of The Guardian’s Technology Blog, who advises readers to believe nothing they read about the iPhone 5′s launch unless they really, really trust the source “And even then, look askance at it.”
Arthur thinks there may be more than one new/refreshed iPhone model rolled out, and it/they may not be called the iPhone 5. While Arthur allows that its possible John Paczkowski’s sources may be bang-on with their October launch prediction (noting that the WSJ is a stickler about not getting things wrong; displaying motto inside its editorial building that it’s better to be late and correct than early and wrong), he notes that the iOS 5 is still scheduled for a September release, the Web beta for iCloud has been released to developers, and he’s hearing from sources in the service provider sector that boxed product believed to contain the refreshed iPhone has arrived for testing network compatibility in carriers labs, so in Arthur’s estimation “the new iPhones are in the system, which means they now just have to get approval – which will probably only take a few weeks at most.”
Arthur reasons that if the refreshed iPhone is good to go, there seems to be no logical reason why Apple would wait to launch it deeper into the fall and missing weeks of sales in the lucrative run-up before Christmas, and speculates that “someone” might actually be feeding disinformation to AllThingsD in order to diminish iPhone 4 sales fall-off in anticipation of a September launch. But who would do that?
Indeed, Forbes’ Brian Caulfield cites Apple watcher and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimating that delaying the iPhone 5 release until October could cut the number of iPhones sold during the quarter ending in September by 2 million units.
Arthur does riff a bit on a report by BGR’s Jonathan S. Geller, who says he has confirmed information an internal document received from a reliable source at Canadian wireless carrier Telus, that the iPhone 5 will be released in the Great White North on October 1. Of course, assuming that the Telus mole knows what he/she is talking about, that wouldn’t preclude a September stateside launch. History isn’t much help here, as Apple has been all over the lot as regards synchronizing product releases in Canada and the U.S. There was a three week lag last March for the iPad 2 release north of 49, but the iPhone 3GS was launched on both sides of the border simultaneously.
However…… Geller also observes that October 1 is a Saturday, which would seem an unlikely although not impossible choice for a new product rollout, but says his insider source notes that that Saturdays are the busiest day of the week for wireless retail stores, and doesn’t believe a Saturday launch is unrealistic.
Whenever, Apple is poised to sell a humongous volume of new model iPhones. Despite grumpiness about the seemingly endless gestation and delayed release of the iPhone 5, Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes that Gene Munster in a note to Piper Jaffray clients Monday suggests that pent-up demand for Apple’s new phone could be even greater than expected, citing 64% of respondents in a (concededly small) recent survey indicating that they expect their next phone to be an iPhone, with 29% already owning iPhones and 17% have an Android device, and also 17% indicating they expect their next phone to be an Android.
Regarding product preference and loyalty, 94% of existing iPhone users said they expect to buy another iPhone (only 6% expect to switch to Android), while among existing Android users, only 47% expect to buy another Android smartphone, while a whopping 42% expect to switch to iPhone, leading Munster to conclude that Apple will be cutting into Android’s market share as well as BlackBerry’s.

This post was written by: Irfan Jam

Irfan Jam is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook