Did a Support Rep Confirm a Sprint-Bound iPhone?

Alongside the iPhone 5 rumors we hear on a seemingly daily basis, there has also been a lot of speculation that Apple would be expanding its carrier partnerships this Fall. Although they’ve come a long way from 2007, there’s still a huge opportunity for growth.

The gossip thus far has focused on a possible deal with China Mobile and their 600 million subscribers, but there has also been some chatter regarding the 2 major U.S. carriers left that don’t carry Apple’s smartphone…

T-Mobile and Sprint — the latter being the most important, as the former is merging with AT&T. That would leave Sprint as the last man standing (so to speak) without the extremely popular device.

But there have been a lot of rumors regarding a Sprint-bound iPhone over the last several months, and another one just surfaced. Beatweek is reporting that it has been sent information regarding the nation’s 3rd largest carrier and one of the country’s hottest smartphones.

Apparently, the site has acquired screenshots of a conversation between a Beatweek reader and a Sprint support rep. After some dillydallying, the conversation ends up on the topic of the iPhone:

“First question from our reader: “Is there any possibility of an iPhone on Sprint in the near future?” And the answer from the Sprint rep: “Please know that we are planning to launch the phone,” and then she went on to explain that there’s no specific release date for it and that we should be watching Sprint.com for updates…”

As TheNextWeb notes, you can pretty much draw 2 conclusions from this conversation. The first would be that Sprint has been doing a little too much talking internally, and the rep really has heard that they’ll be carrying the device.

The other, more likely scenario, is that the rep was just trying to retain a customer. It’s not at all a common business practice to share private information like this with low-level support reps, so my money’s on she’s full of it.

Sprint’s bleeding customers right now, and I’m sure a fair amount of them have named the iPhone as their reason for leaving. Why not tell them that you’ll eventually get the device? After all, it’s almost inevitable, right?

While it’s heavily expected, there has been no official word of a Sprint-bound iPhone. Adding the carrier would mean another 50 million customers, but Apple has survived just fine up to this point without them. I guess we’ll find out in September.

What do you think? Will the iPhone be on Sprint this Fall?