It's hard to say how calculated this was. After all, AT&T CEO, Randall Stephenson, doesn't have the reputation of being as outspoken as, say, Motorola's Ed Zander, and from the sound of it, he didn't exactly reveal some top secret iPhone specs and the identity of a CIA operative drunkenly at one of those weird super rich guy parties.

Still, there's a part of me that can't help but envision a black turtlenecked Steve Jobs stroking a cat behind his giant CEO desk in Cupertino, telling Stephenson why he should never take sides against the family.

Whatever the motivation, the head of the country's largest wireless carrier--an industry which Jobs, as he has already made abundantly clear, rates somewhere between the cockroach and naked mole rat on the evolutionary scale--has less than subtly spilled the beans about one crucial feature of the upcoming iteration of the Apple iPhone: 3G.

Now, it's not exactly a huge secret that the phone would be upping its wireless speed, which currently rates somewhere around a 2.5, thanks to EDGE. The phone's speed has been one of the biggest complaints amongst users, since its inception. Jobs, however, has asserted thus far that 3G phones are, "real power hogs," according to a Bloomberg story, saying, "We've got to see the battery lives for 3G get back up into the five-plus-hour range. Hopefully we'll see that late next year." Stephenson, for his part, said that that time would be, well, pretty soon. "You'll have it next year," adding that the cost of such a phone would be up to Jobs.

Oh, and since he was on a role, Stephenson also addressed Verizon's big news that hit early this week, stating that it was, "overblown...The industry's headed that way. We are probably one of the most open networks in the world, not just the U.S.''

Oh, snap. You gonna take that lying down, Verizon?