Earlier this week, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray sent the hearts of some Magenta customers racing when he told CNET in an interview that the chipset that Apple will use in its next iPhone will support AWS, meaning that the new handset could play nice with T-Mobile 3G. Now T-Mobile has issued a clarification on Ray's statement, claiming that the exec's words were misconstrued and that he was actually just talking about chipsets that are available to all. The carrier's explanation is as follows:

"Comments made by T-Mobile’s CTO, Neville Ray, regarding the evolution of chipsets to include additional bands were misconstrued. Mr. Ray was speaking generally to chipset advancements available to all phone manufacturers. T-Mobile has no knowledge of Apple’s product roadmap and our position on the iPhone has not changed."

That's definitely kind of a bummer for the T-Mobile crowd, although it's not really a shock to see T-Mo issue a clarification on what Ray said. In fact, it's more surprising that it took a few days for the clarification to come forward. Now everyone can go back to wondering whether or not this will be the year that we finally see a T-Mobile iPhone. With the availability of pentaband chips and the fact that T-Mobile will now be continuing forward on its own, such a product is a possibility. As with most Apple-related rumors, though, we won't know for sure until someone from the company is on stage and making the device official.