Last Friday a story appeared on Reuters that according to the 3G Apple iPhone would finally rear its long awaited, high-speed head, in May or June this year.

I say story, when really it’s just another in a long line of speculation regarding the next iPhone, this time courtesy of a research report from a Bank of America analyst. These 3G iPhone rumour mill stories do appear with predictable regularity and everybody loves running them as they are dead certs for traffic. IT PRO didn’t run the story as we felt like giving the bandwagon a rest on this one, but I couldn’t help talking about it here.

The timing for the release does make sense as when the iPhone was first released Steve Jobs said that Apple would only release the 3G version when lower power chipsets were available so that the faster speeds wouldn’t come at the expense of staying power.

I can attest to this issue myself – I’ve been using an O2 Stellar for a couple of months and while it’s a very impressively featured device, it’s about as much use as the brick it resembles when the battery has run dead because you’ve forgotten to plug it in of an evening.

According to this Mac site, Broadcom has just such a chip, (BCM21551), which as it’s built on a 65 nanometer micron process consumes less power than rival 3G chipsets, which have been built using the larger 90 nanometer process.

Gartner has also suggested that the new iPhone will use an OLED screen, not only making it thinner but also saving more power.

In fact it’s a HSPA chip, supporting the HSDPA flavour used in Europe, which mean we should see the iPhone capable of supporting 7.2Mbps downloads and possibly upstream speeds of 5.8Mbps.

That sounds wonderfully fast, but I have to say I find it deeply ironic that O2 is the network that’s going to be getting the 3G/HSDPA iPhone. Of all the networks it seems, at least from my personal experience to have the worst 3G coverage out there.

I’ve used 3G phones from all networks and used to run a V800 on Vodafone, in the early days of 3G. I was one of the few people in the country to actually make use of video calling now and then – a great way to see the kids when staying late at the office, without them having to be crowded round a PC. But while it was fine on Vodafone, I’ve rarely been able to get acceptable video calling on O2, and I’ve given up even trying.

I’m not the only one who thinks so either, as only a few months ago, Ofcom rapped O2’s knuckles for not being up to scratch with its 3G coverage, though only by having its 25 year licence reduced by four months - pathetic.

Since the introduction of USB dongles, mobile broadband has really taken off – you can’t move for the ads on the tube and in the papers. But guess who doesn’t have a USB offering? Yup – O2.

It even had to scramble to get its EDGE coverage up to snuff which the iPhone needs to make it’s web browsing speeds more respectable.

So, with rumours hotting up that the 3G iPhone is possibly only a month or two away, I’m now quite worried about how it will perform on O2’s network.

Of course I hope I’m wrong and it will fly, but I can’t help think that if not, the iPhone unlocking market will get a real boost once the new boy racer hits town.