Click to View

The Wall Street Journal's tech guru Walt Mossberg, speaking at the Beet.TV conference in Washington, D.C. recently, indicated Apple may release a 3G-enabled iPhone sooner than expected, in what now amounts to less than two months.

During a talk where he lamented the state of American broadband networks, both wireless and wired, Mossberg predicted the iPhone "will be 3G in 60 days." The statement can be found late in a 7 minute video - at about the 6:50 mark - Mossberg posted to his blog a few days ago.

If Mossberg’s accurate, then it’ll still be springtime when the new iPhone ships. Most others envisaged a 3G iPhone release sometime this summer.

It is also shortly before Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference takes place, which starts on June 9th, and around the time when Apple plans to roll out iPhone 2.0—a firmware upgrade to bring native applications, more comprehensive enterprise support, and more to the smartphone. In other words, Mossberg’s possible timing for an announcement, let alone a release, of the next-generation iPhone couldn't be better.

So does Mossberg know something everyone else doesn't? It's possible.

After all, he is often one of the first people to get a look at new Apple products. This included early access to the original iPhone model weeks before it shipped late last June.

Perhaps Mossberg's got a 3G iPhone on hand already? You never know.

At this point, you may be asking yourself: What's the big deal about a 3G iPhone? Well, cellular-wireless 3G technology delivers data transfer speeds far greater than the EDGE network the iPhone currently supports.

That means 3G would give the iPhone a huge, very noticeable, boost in performance for sending and receiving e-mail and text messages, using the miniature version of Safari to access the Web, and downloading third-party applications directly onto the iPhone (a capability coming with iPhone 2.0), for example, when a Wi-Fi isn't present.

Also, today Apple's iPhone iTunes Store only supports buying and downloading music over a Wi-Fi connection, likely due to the limited bandwidth of EDGE. I wouldn't be surprised if this changes when 3G iPhones become available.