Latest Round of iPhone Rumors Spread All Over

Apple’s hottest gadget, the internet-enabled iPhone, has been experiencing another round of rumors all over the internet. Some of the most popular rumors include the iPhone’s price discount in the U.S., a possibe launch of the iPhone in Australia, and a speculation that Apple may introduce support for 802.21 wireless standard.

In the U.S., CNET and Fortune broke rumors that Apple may intend to sell iPhones for a $200 discount directly through Apple stores and resellers, and that these phones would be unlocked. Apparently, AT&T is preparing to subsidize $200 of the cost of a new iPhone, bringing the price down to $199 for customers who sign two-year contracts.

An anonymous source for Australian CNET claimed that Apple plans  to launch the iPhone in Australia in late June with Optus as one of several carriers to support the phone. According to the source Optus will make the announcement mid-May ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference on June 9 in San Francisco.

Yet another Apple hobbyist blog, 9to5Mac, speculated that Apple may introduce support for the little-known 802.21 wireless standard, “which is soon to be an official standard that converges various types of fixed and mobile technologies,” and that Apple will push this yet official standard to include WiMAX into its impending 3G iPhone.

Commonly referred to as WiMAX or less commonly as WirelessMAN or the Air Interface Standard, IEEE 802.16 is a specification for fixed broadband wireless metropolitan access networks (MANs) that use a point-to-multipoint architecture. 802.16 supports very high bit rates in both uploading to and downloading from a base station up to a distance of 30 miles to handle such services as VoIP, IP connectivity and TDM voice and data.

Probably the most outrageous rumor has been spread by the French web site, iPhon.fr, which recently posted alleged pictures of upcoming 3G iPhone.  Most iPhone fans denounced these photos as ‘fake’ due to digital fuzziness, crooked iPhone logo, and the availability of fake 3G photos online (see above, we also used a fake  ’3G iPhone’ photo in this article). According to ITWire’s Alex Zaharov-Reutt:

Some also claim the phone looks suspiciously like an LG model, or that it is a Chinese fake iPhone, several of which I’ve seen for sale on the web at eBay and other places, having copied the iPhone’s icons but slapping them onto Windows Mobile 6 instead, even coming with a built-in stylus.

Whether any of these rumors turn out to be true, remains to be seen.