The iWhatever Deadpan Line of the Day

Bloomberg reporter Mary Childs closed another shakily sourced report on the future of the iPhone with the remarkable observation on Apple:

The company plans to introduce a tablet computer later this month, according to a person familiar with the matter.

I guess that qualifies maybe 4 billion people in the world to be the source, since we are all intimately familiar with the matter–without actually knowing anything about it.

Actually the sourcing of the rest of the piece, like nearly everything else written about Apple’s plans for anything, was equally suspect. Tim Horan, a telecom analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., was quoted as saying that the iPhone will be available on all major U.S. carriers by the end of this year. And his justification for the claim:

We believe AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity arrangement with Apple will be expiring by mid-2010. For wireless carriers, customers are demanding the device and they need to remain competitive.

The contribution of this to the store of human knowledge is about zero.

Isn’t it about time that all of us stopped parroting the Apple-releated blathering of everyone declaring him- or herself to be an analyst, especially when the latest breathless “news” really makes no claim to be anything more than a guess. All we know is that Apple is announcing something Wednesday and if it isn’t a tablet, their will be a lot of disappointed fanboys, investors, analysts, and reporters. Beyond that, those talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk.

Bu the way, while it is possible that  the iPhone will become available to all comers when the AT&T exclusivity expires, it would require a new iPhone model or models. The current iPhone supports GSM and EDGE at 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 Mhz and UMTS/HSPA 3G at 850, 1900, and 2100 Mhz. To support T-Mobile, Apple would have to add 3G at 1700 MHz. Verizon and Sprint would need CDMA 1X and EV-DO at 800 and 1900 MHz, the former for Verizon only. That’s a lot of radios to cram into one little phone.