Our peeps over at TUAW (The Ultimate Apple Weblog) are linking to a Wall Street Journal post that seems to affirm Apple CEO Steve Jobs will announce an Apple branded cell phone today.
This phone is supposed to be marketed by Cingular Wireless.
You know Cingular- the outfit that kept moving the release date for their flavor of BlackBerry Pearl, and unlike T-Mobile, kept almost their entire retail and online distribution channels in the dark.
RIM put up with that because RIM tends to defer lots of marketing and distribution efforts to their carrier partners.
But at Apple, it is difficult to imagine Steve Jobs letting the carriers rule.
So I wonder if he'll be capable of baby-sitting Cingular'd distribution for such a product in a tight-ship way that BlackBerry/RIM was unwilling to because of their "carriers-first" corporate culture?
1. No question about it! The new iPhone will be huge and Apple will have the muscle and finesse at marketing to make Cingular the company they currently are not. Also, keep in mind, this phone is also the new iPod with integration through iTunes (Mac & PC) so the synching is built in. From what Jobs said today, and what you can read on the internet, this has truly been a design partnership.
Posted at 4:34PM on Jan 9th 2007 by RS