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Verizon iPhone Rumored For Early Next Year
Many readers are submitting coverage from around the Net, all based on a Bloomberg piece quoting two anonymous sources who insist that Verizon Wireless will offer a CDMA iPhone in January 2011. No one at Verizon or Apple would confirm, of course, and no one at AT&T would comment. "The iPhone, which has been the sole domain of rival AT&T in the US since June 2007, will give Verizon a boost in its competition for smartphone customers, UBS AG analyst John Hodulik said in an interview. Verizon customers, who numbered 92.8 million at the end of the first quarter, may buy 3 million iPhones a quarter, he estimates. ... 'Apple is going to dramatically increase the number of devices it sells in the US when exclusivity at AT&T ends,' said Hodulik. ... 'It's hard to ignore the quality issues that AT&T has faced.'"
I suppose I am an Apple "fanboy" and I like hearing interesting Apple news as much as the next guy, but there is no news here.
I was in business school recently. Lots of classmates purchased iPhones. An equal number wanted to but did not want to switch their family plans from Verizon to AT&T. If and when Verizon becomes an option I expect a spike in sales like we are seeing with the introduction of the iPhone 4. When I think about it, maybe its good for Apple to add Verizon in between phone updates and not at the same time. It would just be more strain on a new supply chain trying to get ramped up.
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But it would be unbelievably hilarious to imagine what would happen if Verizon announced that they would be carrying the iPhone and, once all the eager little pre-orderers had plunked down their US Treasury gift cards, revealed the horrible truth: that the ViPhone had had the same ghastly Verizon software makeover as most of the other phones Verizon sells, unbelievably unintuitive red interface, V-Cast music store, and all.
It would certainly calm fears at AT&T about subscriber loss...
Its really too bad Apple didn't go with multiple carriers from the beginning, I think they've already tarnished their phones reputation by keeping it on AT&T's crappy network, not to mention now bandwidth caps, how am I supposed to use Hulu's Iphone app if I only have 2GB of data to last me a month?
Really, Apple should have gone multi-carrier from the 3G(S) onwards and probably from the first iPhone... But, this is Apple, after all, AT&T's terrible network is just part of the experience! Now you can be complaining about it like the masses!
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this will have less of an impact for verizon than people might think. in a year, android will be even more entrenched in their existing user base. for new users, there will be new android offerings that out-gear the iphone 4.
> 'It's hard to ignore the quality issues that AT&T has faced.'"
Even harder to ignore that Verizon's closed network only runs Verizon phones.
If Verizon is building LTE then that can run iPhone 4G. Can't see a CDMA iPhone at this late stage. It's been end-of-lifed for quite some time. An iPhone 4G launch on Verizon is an event. Verizon and AT&T competing for iPhone users with the same handsets is an event.
nothing that will work on the ATT network will work on Verizon. different chipsets, different modulation, different cell-skip algorithms.
so Apple would have to whip up two different phones altogether. they could keep the screen and maybe some of the case parts, but nothing else. they don't do that.
we are entering a new era, in which the 4G systems are going to be more similar than different. now, it makes sense for Apple to span multiple 4G systems, as you just fork the software left or right at boot, and twiddle some tables. note the rumored verIphone will only work in the 4G realm, which will be 1/5 of the network or so in January, but the whole thing by the 2012/2013 boundary.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hope the feds investigate these rumor-churns that seems to do nothing else but manipulate the price of Verizon's stock than actually - you know - result in an iPhone for Verizon. They've been putting out false flags for 3 years now.
Only Madoff could run a game as long as Verizon is.
Yup. That's why when the iPhone 4G launched they allowed anyone to sign up for one, even if they weren't near the end of their contract. Now AT&T has locked in everyone who was an Apple fanboy or early adopter, and probably the majority of iPhone upgraders. When (if) it hits Verizon in January the only people who will be interested are the (relatively) few people who wanted an iPhone but who didn't want to leave Verizon for AT&T AND who didn't already shell out for a Droid X, Droid 2, or whatever Droid device launches this fall that includes everything the iPhone 4 has.
What would be interesting though is if the Verizon iPhone 4 were an LTE handset. Verizon has been rolling out LTE but has said that they won't launch a handset until 2011. An LTE iPhone launch would be a real head-turner, providing the simultaneous voice and data capability that AT&T likes to tout along with 4G bandwidth.
There are also phones that simultaneously do GSM and CDMA. My BlackBerry Tour works on Verizon's network, but can also roam onto just about any GSM network worldwide (and even has a Verizon SIM card, which is a bit of an oddity I suppose)
The phone's a piece of shit otherwise, but it can indeed hop onto both networks, (and make incomprehensibly noisy phone calls, and achieve miserable speeds for its limited selection of worthless apps during its incredibly short battery life).
That's my work phone. My personal phone is a Droid Incredible, which is a fantastic piece of hardware with some great software underneath it. RIM is going to tank once another company figures out how to capture the "enterprise" market. Their products are godawful.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose