AT&T CEO spills beans on next iPhone

By Keith Shaw on Fri, 11/30/07 - 9:54am.

New iPhone next year It's pretty well known that Apple is very secretive when it comes to product announcements, so this has got to irk them when a business partner just freely announces new product details.

At an appearance late Wednesday at the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, Calif., AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the company will offer a version of the iPhone next year that runs on a faster wireless network. One of the complaints about the initial iPhone model was that it ran on AT&T's slower EDGE network, not the faster 3G networks such as UMTS. The difference in data transfer speeds is similar to comparing dial-up to broadband Internet.

While this isn't earth-shattering news (it doesn't take a genius to figure out that a) a new iPhone will be out this year; and b) that it would run on the faster network), I giggled a little when hearing this news, if only because the folks in Cupertino love go guard their secrets so much.