Changing the game

Apple, in the guise of Steve Jobs, loves unexpected announcements. Too bad they’ve been a bit thin on the ground of late. The biggest sock knocker since the macbook air was the lack of anything unexpected in the iPad. Expectations of the next unexpected announcement are high following the WSJ article giving weight to rumors of a CDMA iPhone coming for Verizon this fall. However, thanks to two year contracts, family plans, and corporate IT management, there is enough inertia that this would not lead to the vast change in smartphone market share that some seem to expect.

What would be a truly unexpected and utterly market driving announcement for Apple to make would be a 4G iPhone for this fall. Wimax with Sprint would be the obvious play from both hardware maturity and network rollout standpoints. Clearwire should have Wimax coverage in enough major metropolitan areas by this Christmas to let Sprint sell a 4G iPhone to almost any one who wants one.  This would give Sprint a strong first mover advantage in 4G, especially if Quallcomm’s  LTE development schedule slips enough to push LTE smartphones into 2011.

It would keep Android smart phones at bay and avoid letting HTC have an entire year of 4G smart phone sales to itself. Additionally Sprint would likely agree to more generous terms than Apple gets from ATT now. Two solid wins for Apple.

Regardless of which carrier it is on, a 4G iPhone in 2010 will shake up the wireless industry and provide Apple with a huge opportunity to gain further control over what is increasingly becoming its core business. These are the things that Jobs lives for. He hates letting someone else be the gatekeeper to his hardware and he loves eating someone else’s lunch. I will be quite surprised if we don’t get the mother of all “one more thing” announcements in the next few months.

Maybe they could get Peter Falk to deliver it and show Steve Jobs how it’s really done.