iPhone 6 rumor rollup for the week ending May 24

A bit later, he adds this: “‘End of the summer means when there’s going to be a good commercial moment for launching 4G,’ said Mr Colao.”

The uninitiated may wonder who the mysterious “Mr Colao” is and why he’s talking about Vodafone. You won’t learn that from Williams’ story.

Mr. Colao is Vittorio Colao, the Italian who is CEO of Vodafone Group Plc, the British multinational telecommunications company. Vodafone holds a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless, the subsidiary it created with Verizon Communications, which is currently enticing or pressuring Colao to sell back its stake in the wireless carrier.

As this Reuters story makes clear, Tuesday was the day Colao announced the company’s full-year financial results, and then talked with reporters about a wide range of issues. Reuters focused on financial and business questions in its story.

Other news organizations focused on Colao’s comments about Vodafone’s 4G/LTE network plans, such as The Guardian’s Juliette Garside, whose posting gives the details and context missing from Williams’ post.

“Having spent £790m on 4G spectrum at a government auction in February, Vodafone had been expected to launch this month or next,” Garside writes. “But it would have done so without the world’s best-selling smartphone.”

Currently, only the mobile operator EE offers a British 4G cellular network, and is the only operator to carry the iPhone 5. Rivals Vodafone and O2 plan to run 4G on different frequencies, currently not yet supported by Apple.

She quotes Colao at length, revealing more clearly the context and the meaning of his comments. “‘We are convinced our own 4G will be better performing,’ said Vodafone’s chief executive, Vittorio Colao. ‘We want to be able to launch it when it’s really ready. End of the summer means when there is going to be a good commercial window for launching it.'”

Colao pretty obviously, and reasonably, is saying that Vodafone wants to make sure the 4G network is solid; that “end of summer” gives them the time to ensure that; and that end of summer coincides with a “good commercial window” which certainly could be a reference to the expected time frame of Apple’s Next iPhone announcement. Perhaps because Colao was paying attention last month when Apple CEO Tim Cook clearly stated, at his company’s quarterly earnings call, that “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software, and services that we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014 [emphasis added].”

[ DETAILS: Apple’s Cook resets 3 popular, and wrong, Apple rumors ]
iPhone 6, iPhone 5S will have flexible Corning Gorilla Glass screens

International Business Times’ Erik Pineda seems to have made this rumor up on his own. At bottom, the idea that the Next iPhone probably will use a cover glass from the same manufacturer that’s been supplying glass for previous iPhones can hardly be considered a revelation.

It’s the word “flexible” that suggests something new. But IBT is simply deceptive. The headline to the post is “iPhone 6, iPhone 5S Will Have Flexible Screens Made of Corning Gorilla Glass on Release Date?”