Verizon, 4G and iPhones

cgriffin21 writes "Verizon plans to launch its 4G LTE network in 38 major U.S. metropolitan areas by year's end, in an ambitious rollout that will also drape high-speed mobile broadband coverage over 60 airports." Not coincidentally, everyone and their brother is talking about iPhone on Verizon in 2011, and what that means to Android.

Comments

too little too late

[SoupGuru]

Tons of people got tired of waiting for the iPhone on Verizon and had to settle for an Android phone only figure out, "Hey, this Android stuff is actually pretty cool!" and now have no desire for an iPhone. So Apple might get more of the currently-smartphoneless-on-Verizon demographic when their contracts allow them to upgrade, but I think they've lost every single one that's bought into Android up to this point.

Nothing?

[geoffrobinson]

"If I wanted an iPhone, I would have gotten one."

I, I, I.

How something impacts Android is completely dependent on how it would affect you? There may be a few people out there who decided to go with Android because they didn't want to switch to AT&T.

Re:It means nothing to Android.

[Andy Dodd]

While the CPU in the iPhone is an "Apple spec" CPU, most likely the radio chipset is from a third party.

Most such third parties offer roughly equivalent GSM and CDMA chipsets (In fact, probably 50%+ of the GSM/UMTS smartphone market is powered by Qualcomm chipsets, despite Qualcomm being the creator and backer of cdmaOne/CDMA2000), making it not too difficult to make a CDMA version of a phone and a GSM version.

Also, you show a fundamental lack of understanding of RF and communications engineering. New band = new antenna. Same bands but different protocol = no new antenna, just a different baseband processor. Therefore, adding T-Mobile's additional band is the least likely route for Apple to go.

Changing the iPhone from GSM/UMTS to CDMA2000 (note: UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme, one of the reasons Qualcomm is involved in that market despite them backing a competing protocol/air interface suite - they're good at making CDMA chipsets whether it is the UMTS protocol/air interface suite or CDMA2000) most likely entails:
1) Switch out the baseband processor chip. Note that as I said before, nearly all UMTS chipset providers also provide CDMA2000 chipsets that are very similar and require little engineering
2) Remove the now unneeded SIM slot (what was that about a packed device?)

That's about it

Note: Right now, Apple gets their radio chipsets from Infineon, but there is a lot of evidence pointing to them moving to Qualcomm for the 5th gen iPhone, with the ability to produce a CDMA version being one of a number of reasons, Infineon getting purchased by Intel being a bigger reason - see http://touchreviews.net/iphone-5-qualcomm-radio-chip/ - I don't know about Infineon chipsets, but it is VERY easy to make both a CDMA2000 and GSM/UMTS version of a phone if you use Qualcomm for your radio chipsets, which is why a large portion of HTC's GSM product line have near identical CDMA equivalents.