Doesn't stop them from making sure you know that the 4S is just as fast all these "4G" phones (stopping short of comparing to real 4G phones, of course).

https://plus.google.com/109995794392976695103/posts/PdBbSct8...

Other manufacturers have only themselves to blame for that.

I would be surprised if it wasn't the carriers that started that particular obfuscation.

Probably a typo... :P

For me the surprise was iPhone 3G back then with Apple skipping the iPhone 2. Apple probably was thinking about iPhone 4G but it wasn't perfect yet or they just wanted to stop marketing hardware features like that.

Apple likes to call their products by the same name worldwide. Are there any countries other than the US where HSPA+ networks are advertised as 4G? And on the other hand, are there countries where advertising HSPA+ as 4G is prohibited?

I think both 3G and 4G are a lot less present in carriers’ marketing in Germany. And maybe I missed it but I haven’t seen a big marketing campaign for 4G in Germany. I wasn’t even aware how widely available it already is†.

Carriers in Germany seem to be a lot more willing to use standard names for their marketing, e.g. UMTS, HSDPA, LTE, probably mostly because all carriers are using the same standards. (No one uses CDMA in Germany.)

I also haven’t seen any carrier refer to something as 4G that’s not LTE.

—

† http://www.t-mobile.de/funkversorgung/inland/ — http://www.vodafone.de/privat/hilfe-support/netzabdeckung.ht...

What I would like to know is why LTE is available in all those weird places with relatively low population densities and rarely in cities. What’s going on there?

In at least some European countries 4G is everywhere.

That doesn't answer either question -- first you need to define what they're calling "4G" in those countries. Is it HSPA+? WiMax? LTE?

True, sorry, I read it as something else.