EE to announce superfast 4GEE pricing – Oct 23rd

Rating: Probably to coincide with Apple iPad Mini launch

It’s virtually certain that EE will announce pricing for its 4G LTE network in the UK tomorrow [October 23rd 2012]. The smart money is on timing to coincide with whatever it is that Apple is planning to announce at a Press event on that day which will start at around 6pm our [UK] time. Given that the Apple invite says, “We’ve got a little more to show you,” virtually everyone is betting that the announcement will confirm the launch of the iPad mini. That will be a seven inch version of the iPad to compete with the likes of the Google Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire. We’re also expecting EE to announce the brand for its 4G service as superfast 4GEE.Everyone appears to know that the iPad mini will have a 7.85 inch screen. But there’s speculation as to what kind of connectivity it will boast.

Given that EE let the cat out of the bag that Apple’s iPhone 5 will have 4G LTE connectivity (see our previous story here), the timing of its superfast 4GEE tariffs and the Apple announcement can be taken as an indication that the mini will boast 4G LTE.

Curiously, when Steve Jobs was alive he famously described 7 inch tablets as ‘tweeners’ because they were too big to compete with a regular iPad.

So Apple new CEO, Tim Cook, will be performing something of a u-turn if his company really does release a tweener.

Our speculation about EE branding for its 4G LTE service is based on text messages it has been sending out to its Orange customers who were informed on 20th October [2012] that their handsets would start displaying EE on their phones rather than Orange T-Mobile.

Under the terms and conditions it here, it has the sentence, “Superfast 4GEE: just how fast your 4G will be depends on a couple of things: where you are and how many other people are using 4G too.”

Plus, of course, there’s the Twitter feed here where EE itself using the hashtag #4GEE.

Orange has, of course, previously promised to send out LTE enabled SIM card to customers before the offcial launch date [October 30th 2012], so we’ll see the new branding on those.