Apple bringing the LTE based iPad 3 and iPhone 5 next year

So rumor has it that Apple might be preparing something steamy: the LTE-based iPad 3 Smart Cover
and LTE-based iPhone 5. The first one is said to be arriving by summer 2012 and the latter in the fall. Nikkei Business claims that Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has made a deal with Apple and has become the official distributor for these next-generation devices.

The report also claims that executives of the Japanese company already met up with Apple staff including with new CEO Tim Cook, at some point in November and discussed the issues related to the LTE enabled iDevices.

The iPhone date isn’t far fetched, as it would be a year later after the iPhone 4S launch. The iPad 3 launching in the summer might struck some as late, but it’s not that late, if you keep in mind that the date will enable Apple to gain access to second generation LTE chips.

What’s puzzling with these rumors is that Japan’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo has been selling its handsets through Apple’s rival carrier Softbank. Softbank used to have an exclusivity contract with Apple, but that went down the drain, when the Silicon Valley company launched its iPhone 4S. Since then Apple has partnered up with carrier KDDI.

The next iPhone will of course be sporting the Apple A6 SoC, which many experts seem to believe is carrying an in-house design with four ARM Cortex A 15 processing cores and an unknown graphic core. The iPad 3 Covers
on the other hand will reportedly house a higher-resolution display than its little brother the iPad 2, and some changes are going to be made to its pixel density. Still, this change might cause some brightness issues.