Apr 23, 2011
Back in March, AT&T announced that it would be buying T-Mobile, its GSM competitor in the United States, for $39 billion. This deal would make AT&T the largest wireless carrier in the United States and would allow AT&T to take advantage of T-Mobile’s 4G/LTE infrastructure in attempting to meet the data speed demands of the next generation of phones and wireless devices. It may be quite a while before AT&T completes the purchase, but the announcement left a small contingent of T-Mobile customers — those with jailbroken AT&T iPhones — wondering if AT&T would cut their service off.
According to a report published today by BGR, they may not have to wonder. BGR has published a photo of what they claim to be a confidential prototype of a soon-to-be-released T-Mobile iPhone. Interestingly, the unit is also a white iPhone. BGR also suggests that the unit could be an iPhone 5 prototype with the hardware of an iPhone 5 hidden inside the body of an iPhone 4.
It would be an interesting business decision to release the iPhone on the T-Mobile network so soon after the announcement of a pending purchase by AT&T. However, with the purchase still needing to go through anti-trust approval and such, it could still be a long way off. In the meantime, T-Mobile likely wants to keep its value as high as possible.
