iOS 4.3 to come out before X-Mas? [iPhone / iPad / iTouch]

While it’s been rumoured that iOS 4.3 will be released by Apple in January 2011, there’s now new anecdotal evidence that we’ll in fact get our hands on it before X-Mas.
This information comes from UK’s Guardian newspaper’s website, which states that a new version of its iOS news app will be available before X-Mas.
This new app version will feature a subscription option, ranging from “£2.99 for a six month subscription and £3.99 for 12 month.”

As it is, news apps do not have a subscription option at the moment (in fact nor do any other apps), and it’s been rumored that Apple will introduce such a feature with iOS 4.3.
Putting 1 and 1 together (and assuming that Guardian is not wrong and is not throwing some sort of a marketing gimmick), it would appear that we’ll be able to download iOS 4.3 before Christmas 2010, which is only a few weeks from now.

And it would be nice if Apple gave us such a Christmas present. After all, apart of its understandable use for news and magazine apps subscriptions, it should be able to stop piracy in many cases using server side subscription-based protection (see: how piracy affects iOS apps developers), and additionally create an active subscription based iOS MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) scene, which could in fact be very successful on the iPhone and iPad.