Rumor that the New Apple Tablet Connects Through Your IPhone to the Internet (Rumor or Hubris?)
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This is essentially a Palm "Foleo" rumor that somehow the device connects to the internet through the 3G interface on your IPhone. This either has to be a horribly ill thought out rumor or hubris.
A tablet that uses AT&T's already strained netowrk through IPhone tethering strikes me as a materially unpleasant idea. It's true that current IPhones won't currently tether to a PC, but if you use a little bit of clever software the phones are perfectly capable of doing this.
Palm tried to announce a scheme like this and it got shouted down so loudly that Palm abandoned it quickly during a time when it was in dire need of new products. With rumors that Steve Jobs is extremely pleased with the device make me think this "tethering by proxy" is not the method used to connect and the rumors have got to be false. It strikes me as hubris to force customers to buy AT&T IPhones to make a 3G connection happen.
If customers actually loved this kind of scheme it would be great for Apple as it would force them to buy both an IPhone and a Tablet and drive substantially more wireless data traffic onto one carrier.
The more data traffic Apple can channel through to a carrier, that's better for Apple and a tablet would certainly do that with ebooks, newspapers and heavier internet browsing. However, it's not clear that AT&T could take the traffic strain and it would almost certainly require a deal with another carrier like T-Mobile with its flimsy 3G network. Ideally, a deal would go to Sprint or Verizon or even better all three (ideally).
The price--assuming the retaill is $900--take a few hundred bucks off a carrier subsidy at $599 retail.
Does the exclusivity agreement cover only the IPhone or would a device 2.5 times as big escape carrier exclusivity which is rumored to end this year? More questions than answers this morning, but most of the data points to this rumor of a Foleo like connection mechasim as a bad rumor.
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