iPhone 5 & iPad 2 Come with New Baseband Chips

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Intel might not have long as supplier of the 3G chipsets for the iPhone and iPad, with reports in China surfacing that claim Apple is planning to switch its baseband allegiance to Qualcomm for iPhone 5 and iPad 2. The move, AppleInsider suggests, does not necessarily confirm the ongoing rumors of a CDMA iPhone – despite the apparent public demand for a Verizon iPhone option – but given Qualcomm's dual-mode wireless chips would at least make that a greater possibility.

The recent report talking about such a move from Apple is the Economic Daily News from Taipei but the newspaper isn't implying that the next-gen Apple mobile devices, the iPhone 5 in particular. Qualcomm will make the baseband chips with CDMA support for iPhone 5 and iPad 2. There's no confirmation either regarding a potential Qualcomm partnership with Apple, not that we'd expect them to make it public just yet.

Such a partnership is definitely plausible considering the fact that Qualcomm has invented CDMA baseband chipsets in the first place, and in the near future the same company might have in place dual chips that would let manufacturers to make dual CDMA/GSM smartphones that could be used, in the USA, both on CDMA networks like Verizon and Sprint and on GSM networks like AT&T and T-Mobile. And at some point in future Apple will want to have all the four U.S. carriers sell some version of the iPhone in the USA, so such chips might come in handy.

Again, that doesn't mean the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 will support CDMA or that it will come with dual CDMA/GSM chipsets. But that's definitely a possibility for the near future.

Naturally, none of the parties involved in these rumors are commenting at this point so we'll definitely look forward for the first iPad 2 teardown, which will provide more details about the components Apple used to build it and hint at similar changes when it comes to the iPhone 5.

Speaking of internal parts, the same report says that iPhone 5 and iPad 2 are going to offer basically the same hardware coming from the same suppliers. Are we than to assume that the next-gen iPhone 5 and iPad 2 are going to be pretty much similar to their predecessors?