Update - 3/26 4:02 PM
As expected, iPhone 5 was announced for T-Mobile today. Find out everything you need to know right here.
T-Mobile users can look forward to sunny weather and an iPhone 5 come June or July. The Deutsche Telekom offshoot announced that Apple's handset will be made available sometime this summer, far sooner than the six to nine months initially stated.
Although news of the moved-up release date is already reverberating joyously through the interwebs among Apple's fan boys and girls, the news is not all silver linings.
T-Mobile will not be offering a carrier subsidy with its version of the iPhone 5, meaning customers will need to pay full price for it. Just how much that will be is unclear at this point, but a 60GB iPhone 5 currently retails for $650 without a contract. Even in this, however, is a bright side, as subscribers will not be tied to a two-year contract.
To date, Apple has not released a T-Mobile-branded iPhone, despite the nearly 2 million users already using the handset on that network. This statistic is facilitated solely through the unlocked-handset market, which has both legitimate and underground channels. Apple itself sells a factory-unlocked iPhone at a premium, or users can bypass the mainstream scene altogether and take their iPhones to a third-party unlocker and pay anywhere from $20 to $100 to remove the carrier restrictions from their devices, along with the warranty.
Still, even those who are willing to fork over the cash for an unlocked Apple handset face an uneasy and imperfect future. iPhones on T-Mobile currently work at 2G speeds, and the promise of a modern LTE network was severely diminished in 2011 when the FCC rejected AT&T's proposal to acquire T-Mobile amid antitrust concerns. Apple's visual voicemail feature has also never functioned properly, though the carrier says it's working on a native version of that feature.
T-Mobile hopes to increase its user base by as much as 5 percent with the new offering, banking on the fact that it still offers comparably cheaper rate plans compared to its peers among the Big Four telecoms.
