According to Japanese blog Macotakara, Apple is planning to release a 4G LTE iPhone and iPad on NTT DoCoMo, which is the dominant mobile phone carrier in Japan.

The Fall 2011 is projected timeframe for the 4G iPhone 5, as it will be a year since the release of the iPhone 4S. The carriers president Kiyoyuki Tsujimura and vice president Takashi Yamada met with CEO Tim Cook mid-November to discuss the status of teh next iPhone. The executives have pinned down the rules at the meeting, including order commitment.

While there were rumors brewing that Apple was getting ready to prepare a 4G LTE device, the company felt that the LTE technology was not developed enough to support an iPhone.

From 9to5Mac:

The Wall Street Journal reported mid-November that negotiations with carriers in Asia came to a standstill because Apple was requiring iPhone sellers to commit to too large a volume. Additionally, NTT DoCoMo wanted to control what software goes on users’ iPhones, a concession Apple was unwilling to make.

Apple doesn’t have a prior distribution agreement with NTT DoCoMo. Instead, the Cupertino, California designer of gadgets partnered with local carrier Softbank to sell the handset to customers in Japan. Beginning with iPhone 4S, Softbank’s exclusivity ended as Apple cut an agreement with au/KDDI. As you know, 9to5Mac yesterday discovered evidence pointing to a next-generation iPhone and iPad in the code of iOS 5.1 Beta, which was seeded to developers on Monday. An iPhone 5,1 reference is of particular interest as it indicates a major iPhone update likely involving Apple’s A6 chip, designed in-house and believed to sport four ARM Cortex A15 processing cores and an unknown graphics core. An iPad 2,4 reference, which we also discovered in iOS 5.1 Beta code, implies a carrier variation, which could mean anything from a 4G LTE version to a GSM+CDMA dual-mode device to a Sprint iPad 2 or something completely new. In a somewhat related iPhone news, carrier China Unicom is said to be awaiting the final paperwork to begin selling iPhone 4S in China. The country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently finished testing the device, it passed the necessary wireless regulatory tests and is now certified for public consumption. China, the 1.33 billion people market, recently overtook the United States to become the world’s leading market for smartphones. Accounting for twelve percent of Apple’s fiscal 2011 revenue, or about fifteen billion dollars, China is increasingly becoming one of Apple’s key growth regions.

So when do you think the 4G LTE iPhone 5 will be released?