Record 200,000 Apple iPhone 4S units reserved at AT&T; Apple iPhone 4S is 4G due to technicality

AT&T has announced that it has set a new company record with 200,000 units of the Apple iPhone 4S pre-ordered in the first 12 hours that the carrier started accepting reservations for the phone. The AT&T public relations department went all out saying that the carrier had seen "extraordinary demand" for the latest iteration of the iconic iPhone and added that it was obvious that customers wanted AT&T's network. The latter's network is the only one of the three U.S. carriers offering Apple's device that lets the handset run at 4G (HSPA+) speeds, twice as fast as what is possible on Verizon and Sprint's 3G network. Furthermore, only AT&T's network allows iPhone 4S owners to talk and download data at the same time (unless you use Wi-Fi in which case simultaneous talk and data can be had on all three networks).

Last year, pre-orders for the Apple iPhone 4 outnumbered the reservations for the iPhone 3GS by a factor of 10 which taxed AT&T's servers, slowing down communications. Some complained of problems yesterday getting through to AT&T to reserve an Apple iPhone 4S. The device will be launched on October 14th in U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. Changes made to the current model include the addition of a dual-core A5 processor (replacing a single-core A4 processor), an 8MP camera (up from 5MP) an improved antenna system and the Siri voice recognition technology.

There is some question about whether or not the Apple iPhone 4S can actually run at HSPA+ speeds. Speculation is that Apple and AT&T are working together to get the network indicator on the AT&T variant of the Apple iPhone 4S to read 4G when the phone is running over the mobile operator's HSPA+ network. While the guys at Cupertino have added the ability for the iPhone 4S to run at 14.4Mbps, a document released by AT&T last month notes that the carrier's HSDPA devices generally run between 3.6 and 7.2Mbps, though most AT&T users experience lower rates than that.

According to TiPB, the Apple iPhone 4S is said to be an HSPA+ phone only because of a technicality. While many feel that a phone should have speeds of 21Mbps to qualify as an HSPA+ device, and therefore be called 4G, the Apple iPhone 4S runs at a maximum of 14.4Mbps. But since the phone can run any 3GPP Release 7 feature, it is still considered an HSPA+ device and thus, a 4G phone. The ITU says that HSPA+ can be considered 4G because certain carriers in the U.S. were advertising it as such.