Network World - This week in rumors, there was a warming trend in the iOSsphere with renewed hope that iPhone 5 might actually have LTE radios after all, along with a magnetic power connector, and with speculation the iPhone was delayed because of either an HTC patent complaint or Steve Jobs' upcoming biography.
In the face of Apple's continued silence about the iPhone 5, the iOSsphere's rumor rating may be downgraded by Standard & Poor's, according to numerous sources familiar with the situation.
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LTE iPhones being tested on mobile carriers might be iPhone 5.
Coyness is a hallmark of iPhone 5 rumoring, and few have the deft touch of BoyGeniusReport's Jonathan Geller. His "exclusive" post begins, "Apple's iPhone 5 is set to be unveiled in the next month or so, though no one quite knows what the device will feature ..."
Nonetheless. "While we can't confirm that the upcoming fifth-generation iPhone will be able to support 4G LTE, we can now exclusively confirm that Apple's carrier partners are testing iPhone models with LTE capability." He leaves it to his readers to connect the first dot and the second dot even though there's no actual connection there.
The basis of this exclusive confirmation is a bit vague, though it doesn't sound vague: "BGR has obtained evidence of an internal iOS test build from one of Apple's major carrier partners, and buried in the firmware is a property list (.plist file) for LTE."
In the iOSsphere these geek-like assertions are reinterpreted and passed on in generous fashion. At MacPost, for example, Mike Webb writes: "BGR were able to procure an internal iOS test build from one of Apple's major carrier partners." Yet Geller only says it obtained "evidence" of such a build, and his sentence structure leaves unclear whether the evidence's source is actually one of the carriers.
According to Apple, property lists, or "plists," are structured data representation that's extensively used by software in iOS and Mac OS X as a "convenient way to store, organize, and access standard types of data." The Mac OS X Finder application uses plists to store file and directory attributes. "Many applications require a mechanism for storing information that will be needed at a later time. For situations where you need to store small amounts of persistent data -- say less than a few hundred kilobytes -- property lists offer a uniform and convenient means of organizing, storing, and accessing the data."
BGR shows four photos that in sequence seem to show the complete plist in question. Near the top of the file is the following: <key>Connected mode LTE Intra-frequency Measurement</key>
Without knowing anything about LTE or intra-frequency measurement, it still seems a stretch to conclude that LTE-equipped iPhones or even prototypes are actively being tested on carrier networks.
Geller concludes with a rhetorical device, which we call "extremification of banality," that's characteristic of tech rumoring. It takes the form of "This doesn't ... but ..."
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