Advertising company steps in to dim the speculation

Jan 30, 2009 09:19 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this week, Mac-focused minds were reporting that Apple's latest iPhone firmware update contained information hinting to a new iPhone model. While this hasn't been confirmed, nor denied, the folks at Pinch Media have seen the “iPhone 2.1” listing prior to the 2.2.1 firmware update.

Pinch Media touts itself as the only advertising company for the iPhone that sits down with developers and helps them determine when advertising makes sense, and when it doesn’t. In a recent post, the company claims to have some additional information on the newly reported find, and decided to step in, as it noticed the hype was beginning to grow.

“At Pinch Media, we’ve seen this [listing] for some time now, and haven’t thought too much of it — even without this data, we’d just automatically assume Apple’s always working on new versions of their core products,” says the advertising company. “But now that [publications] have picked up the story, here’s a little more information,” the post reads.

So, here's what Pinch Media knows:

- the first time an application using Pinch Analytics was run by an ‘iPhone 2,1′ device occurred back in early October 2008; - applications using Pinch Analytics were run by ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices very sporadically until mid-December 2008, when the pace picked up slightly; - to date, a few dozen distinct ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices have run almost two dozen different applications using Pinch Analytics; - when ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices run applications using Pinch Analytics’ optional geolocation tracking, they’re almost exclusively located in the south San Francisco Bay Area; - while most of the sessions have been made from wifi connections, there’s been a few connections over AT&T’s network, so presumably this device handles both.

Also noted by the company that helps iPhone developers grow their businesses is that apps run by Pinch Analytics don’t share much in common, except for their size. “They’re among the larger applications to use our stuff, with hundreds of thousands to millions of unique users,” Pinch Media statistics have showed.

Conclusively, “that’s all we’ve got,” Pinch Media declared. “We don’t know what this is, what it does, what the display resolution is (sorry, tablet fans!) or when it’s going to be released.”