Rumor: AT&T to sell iPhones without contracts or activation

Earlier this week, rumors surfaced that AT&T would start selling the iPhone 3G without the standard two-year contract. The purchaser would pay more for the iPhone: $599 for the 8GB and $699 for the 16GB, but would not be required to activate the phone at the store.

The internal training documents in the article indicate that you’ll need an AT&T mobile account to buy the phone, and while AT&T is limiting the purchases to one iPhone per line, the company has no way of tracking this, so you could walk out the door and into another AT&T shop and buy another, if you liked. Though I think if they start seeing “$599, $599, $599″ showing up on your account, they might get suspicious.

All this, of course, points to a new version of the iPhone coming out (perhaps to coincide with the 3.0 software release this summer), and that AT&T is trying to clear their stock. As we speculated earlier, Verizon also seems to be in a rush to get their existing customer base signed up, selling two-for-one Blackberries in an event that ends in March (about the time AT&T is starting this sale). I’m crossing my fingers for a Verizon iPhone, but think it’s far more likely that Big Red is more worried about the next generation of what Apple and AT&T are cooking up.