This year will be it for Verizon customers to finally get their own version of the Apple iPhone by sometime this year, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. He says you can also expect this year to see an iPhone 5, iPad 2 and an iTunes streaming service.
Just a year early, everyone all over the world wondered if Verizon Wireless would get to debut a version of the Apple iPhone on its leading network.
As of today, that prediction is more of a fact according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who said there is a 95 percent chance that Verizon will debut a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) version of Apple’s iPhone by March.
Munster announced that he also thinks that Verizon is going to activate 9 million iPhones this year, which would total 36 percent of Verizon’s anticipated 25 million smartphone activations.
This extremely long awaited debut, since the iPhone has belonged to AT&T since it came out in 2007, will head off several of Apple’s key announcements. A lot of them are expected to be direct competition with Google’s own hopes for the Android-based mobile market.
Munster added that he doesn’t think that Apple will put out any new product categories in 2011, but that the company may reveal newer versions of its current major products.
In addition, Munster said that he believes with nearly 100 percent probability the Mac App Store launch will occur Jan. 6, though he is less sure about any upcoming new Macintosh computers.
He announced that there is moderate confidence that a redesigned MacBook Pro and iMac will be coming out in 2011. But, he didn’t think the next-generation Mac OS X Lion version will come out this year.
The iPad, which Munster said sent out about 14.5 million units in the U.S. last year, is now being sold in 30 countries. He believes it will be sold in more than 100 other countries soon.
His other predicts include an iPad 2 coming out sometime this spring, which is expected o be thinner, lighter and have both front and rear cameras so people can do FaceTime video chats.
He believes there is a 90 percent chance of seeing iTunes cloud services, which would be competition for any Google Music offering the search comes out with for Android smartphones in 2011.
Other services that may appear later this year include new Apple Web services with expanded support for storing files in the cloud (similar to Google Apps), or remote computing capabilities for Macs and iPads though the cloud (similar to Chrome OS). It’s also expected that Apple will put out a new iPhone 5 with Near Field Communication technology, which would be competition for Google’s Samsung Nexus S unit.
The Nexus S already has an NFC chip and uses the Android 2.3 operating system, which features native NFC support to allow short-range wireless communications between electronic gadgets and contact terminals.
Munster said he believed that the Nexus S, as with the Nexus One, will be the phone to set the standard for the newer, higher end Android units, which means consumers will be seeing more of the NFC chips in their future.
These chips enable users to pay for just about anything with the swipe of a smartphone using appropriate applications. With this in mind, Google and Apple will be competing heavily against each other by the end of this year.
Another prediction by Munster says that Apple will have its hand in the television broadcast market even more heavily by the end of 2012. The one million sales of the Apple TV saw recently leads credence to this prediction. Munster says he expects an Apple TV that has a full Macintosh operating system and a Safari Web browser.
Even though Apple’s commitment to the living room remains only a ‘hobby,’ according to Munster, he says that they will still be going into the TV market with a vengeance as an all-in-one Apple television could move their sales predictions and profits even further once the fully connected TVs of this time get out to the world.
All of this means that things are going to be very competitive for Google TV, Roku, Boxee and all of the others that are attempting to merge the online world of the Internet with the broadcast world of television. But, at the same time, it means the consumers of the world will have many more choices.
