Rumors, yep. The iPhone 4 is also released for all those carriers, but it's not a world phone. You can release one phone in two flavors for CDMA and GSM. Adding the extra radio increases the power consumption and size of the phone - will Apple do that? It does run against their mantra of long-battery-life and small size...
and a CHEAP ($99) Version is also being released (without contract)
Yep. They're starting down the commodity path because they have to - they sell in a commodity market, and while you can offer premium product as well, if you want to play in the commodity market you have to have commodity product. This is Apple moving down in price, trying to hold some meaningful market share.
IOS 5 will be released at the same time as launch, and will take everything to the cloud - backing up your last 1,000 pictures, your complete iTunes library - all free; plus another 5 Gig of non-iTunes apps or music for personal use - again, free of charge. This will make the 8 Gig iPhone 4 useful, as it can then stream music, video and download apps on an as-needed basis.
So, basically what Android and Windows Phone 7 can do today? They're coming late to the party again. Replication across platforms is old-hat to Google and Microsoft.
With the data backed up to the cloud - your need for the SD card goes away.
How does that cloud work for me on a transpacific flight? Not too well...;) And how about taking pictures from a friend's camera and swapping them over to my phone? I can do that with a microSD card - can't do that very easily any other way.
And it's still the fastest way for me to drag-and-drop books and music to consume on my phone when traveling - plug my microSD card into my laptop, drag over what I want, and in a couple of minutes I have 16 GB of data ready to go - no use of my 3G bandwidth (which is a LOT slower than the microSD transfer rate).
The slide of marketshare of iOS devices you are mentioning - just isn't there. I suggest you re-examine your sources.
Really? You need to re-examine yours:
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile OS Market Share
Android is gaining, iOS is falling, and when it comes to new phone sales, Android is outselling iOS 2 to 1.
Oh, as for why not supporting WMV - not now, and likely not ever. Why not? Because .mp4 and H.264 are both rendered in hardware (not software) to save energy. To render in WMV means shuffling bits around - this gobbles power.
Yep. And there are thousands and thousands of WMVs out there that will not be supported by Apple - and force people to re-encode what they have. Heck, I have a few thousand CDs ripped to FLAC and iOS doesn't support them - I'd have to transcode my entire library to work on an iPhone. Or I can get an Android phone or Windows Phone 7 and they would just play.
So, for me (and lots of other people), Apple simply offers nothing that would work. No hardware keyboard (I hate on-screen keyboards, I don't want to lose half my screen when filling out a form or e-mail), no microSD card, not a world phone, and doesn't play the format that most of my media is recorded in (an open source format at that)
